NEWS SPOTLIGHT

Five EOAS researchers are among the recipients of the 2026 Wall Research Awards, with projects spanning forest hydrology, climate and energy systems, sustainable agriculture, biological oceanography and marine virology, reflecting the breadth of research across the department.

The Wall Research Awards are part of the Peter Wall Legacy Awards, supported by the groundbreaking $150 million+ Peter Wall Legacy Fund. Together with the Wall Fellowships, they form one of the largest internal award programs at any university in North America, providing approximately $4 million annually to support UBC research. The awards focus on research relating to British Columbia in three broad areas: sustainable urban development; environmental protection of oceans, beaches and waterfronts; and sustainable approaches to resource-intensive industry. 

Individual Faculty Awards  

($80,000 for individual UBC faculty members to be spent within a three-year term)

Dr. Ali Ameli (Associate Professor) was recognized with an Individual Faculty Award for From Forest Ruts to Streams: How Forestry Machinery Alters Water and Solute Pathways and Connectivity.

Forestry machinery can leave behind ruts, tracks, and compacted soils that alter how rainfall and snowmelt move through forests and reach streams, yet these impacts remain poorly understood. This research will examine forested landscapes across British Columbia, using advanced modelling to understand how machinery-related disturbances affect water movement and stream connectivity under current and future climate conditions. In partnership with regional offices of the B.C. Ministry of Forests, the project will translate these findings into practical guidance for forestry operations to help protect water resources in actively managed forests and surrounding communities.

Team Faculty Awards

($200,000 for groups of 3-5 UBC faculty members to be spent within a three-year term)

Dr. Valentina Radic (Professor) is part of the team awarded for Climate Change and its Impact on B.C.’s Electricity Generation: AI Driven Climate and Grid Planning.

British Columbia relies on hydropower for clean electricity, but climate change is altering snowpack and water flows, making energy supply less predictable as demand grows from population growth, electric vehicles, and heating. This research will use climate data, water system modelling, and advanced energy system analysis to understand future impacts on B.C.’s electricity system and identify solutions, including renewable energy and storage options. The findings will support long-term planning for a reliable, resilient and sustainable electricity system in the face of a changing climate.

Dr. Mark Johnson (Professor) is a member of the team behind From Field to Supply Chain: A Multi-Indicator Sustainability Benchmarking Framework for British Columbia Farms.

B.C. farmers face growing demands from buyers, certifiers, and policymakers to demonstrate sustainability across areas such as greenhouse gas emissions, soil health, biodiversity, and farming practices, yet no single tool helps them measure progress across these areas. Building on LiteFarm, UBC’s globally used farm management application, this research will create a free, bilingual, privacy-protected sustainability benchmarking tool that helps farms respond to diverse supply chain requirements through a unified approach. Co-designed with B.C. and global farming communities, including small-scale and Indigenous producers, the platform will support sustainable agriculture, inform policy, and strengthen climate and biodiversity efforts across the province. 

Graduate Student Awards

($30,000 per year for PhD candidates for one or two years and at $25,000 for Master’s students for one year). 

Bronwyn Hobson (Master of Science in Oceanography) was selected for a Graduate Student Award for Bloom or Bust: How local processes influence phytoplankton in Barkley Sound, British Columbia.

Her research focuses on the conditions that influence phytoplankton in Barkley Sound, British Columbia. Phytoplankton, or microscopic marine algae, form the base of ocean food webs. Their seasonal blooms provide a critical food source for many important species in British Columbia, such as salmon. However, bloom timing and size can vary, and short-term extreme events like marine heatwaves can disrupt healthy bloom conditions. Most current monitoring focuses on large ocean regions, missing important small-scale processes that influence phytoplankton growth—such as tides and daily wind patterns. My research uses high-resolution ocean measurements to explore how local processes impact coastal phytoplankton.

Allie Roberts-Moore (Doctor of Philosophy in Oceanography) received a Graduate Student Award for Characterizing the viruses of copepods and larval Dungeness crab in British Columbia.

Her research identifies, studies, and monitors viruses of copepods and larval Dungeness crab, planktonic animals that are integral to B.C. marine food webs and fisheries. The viruses that infect these organisms and their effects on host populations remain poorly understood, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) identifying a specific knowledge gap in Dungeness crab larval biology. B.C. fishers and conservation bodies rely on accurate biological information, including knowledge of pathogens, to support healthy fisheries and ecosystems. My research will strengthen pathogen surveillance and contribute to understanding the life cycles of organisms key to B.C.’s coastal economy. 

Full list of Wall Legacy Award recipients, with a description of their projects: https://walllegacyawards.ubc.ca/awardees-2026/  

Written in collaboration with Dr. Ali Ameli

Most of the world’s flowing waters remain unmeasured, posing one of the biggest challenges to water security worldwide. This lack of data makes it difficult to forecast floods, protect water quality and sustain aquatic ecosystems. A new study led by UBC researchers establishes the first globally scalable framework for the functional classification of catchments, grouping them by how consistently rainfall is converted into runoff.

Published in Nature Water, the study mapped how rainfall becomes streamflow–the movement of water from the land to water bodies–across more than 80,000 catchments–areas of land where rainfall and other water drain into a common outlet. The research was led by Dr. Ali Ameli, Associate Professor in UBC’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, with Hamed Sharif, Researcher in the department, and Dr. Jeffrey McDonnell, Professor at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Birmingham. 

The global picture was striking. “For most of the planet, knowing how much rain fell tells you surprisingly little about how much water will reach the river,” said Dr. Ameli. Catchments classified as functionally “complex” drain 87% of the ungauged land area assessed in the study, some 121 million of 139 million km². In these catchments, the same amount of rain can produce very different amounts of streamflow from one storm to the next, making river responses to storms difficult to anticipate.

Western British Columbia, however, stands out as one of the clearest exceptions to this complex global pattern. Along BC’s steep, wet Coast Mountains, the researchers found a broad band of catchments that behave much more consistently: the amount of rain falling during a storm is closely related to the amount of runoff reaching the river. These catchments were classified as functionally “simple”. “This consistency is rare globally and was one of the most striking surprises of the study,” said Dr. Ameli.

Why these catchments behave so consistently comes down to the rhythm of their rainfall. Across the study, the strongest single discriminator between the functional types was rainfall persistence, the fraction of each season carrying non-negligible rain. Simple catchments receive rain frequently and stay persistently wet, so successive storms meet similar antecedent conditions. Complex catchments receive rain only intermittently and swing between wet and dry states.

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Two catchments at opposite ends of the classification. Left: the Rio Itapecuru at Rosário, in Maranhão, northern Brazil. The catchment is classified as complex; its mean slope is about 3 degrees with no persistent rainfall falls in the dormant season. Credit: Johan Fredriksson, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons. Right: Barkley Sound near Bamfield, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, within the broad band of simple catchments identified along the Coast Mountains. The catchment here has a mean slope of about 21 degrees, and receives non-negligible rain in every week of the dormant (non-growing) season. Credit: UBC.

By classifying and locating these different functional types of catchments, the study provides a global blueprint for prioritizing streamflow monitoring and selecting flood and water-resource models. Relatively simple catchments may not require highly complex models, whereas the complex catchments that dominate much of the world require models capable of representing changing hydrologic behavior. A supplementary modeling experiment makes the point concretely: a lumped, parsimonious conceptual model reproduced simple catchments well but failed in complex ones, a structural shortcoming that no amount of calibration could overcome.

The team has also released an interactive global map of the results, together with a web application that returns season-specific functional classes for any catchment, either from a boundary polygon the user uploads or from an outlet selected on the map.
 

Read more:

Why most rivers don’t respond to storms the same way twice

A global classification of hydrologic functional diversity in gauged and ungauged catchments
 

Written in collaboration with Filippo Cicchetti 

Like Earth, Mercury has a magnetic field generated by its metallic core – making it the only other planet in the inner Solar System with a present-day global magnetic field. NASA’s MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft orbited Mercury for more than four years, collecting unprecedented measurements before its mission ended with a planned impact on the planet’s surface in 2015. 

MESSENGER also revealed that parts of Mercury’s crust are magnetized, producing smaller magnetic fields in addition to the global field generated by the core. Now, Dr. Catherine Johnson, Professor of planetary geophysics in EOAS, and her collaborators, including EOAS graduate student Filippo Cicchetti, have developed a new model of Mercury’s crustal magnetization and explored its possible origins. The paper is Dr. Johnson’s inaugural article in PNAS since her induction into the National Academy of Sciences in 2023, one of the highest honours a scientist can receive. 

Their paper, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), asks whether Mercury’s crust became magnetized by a stronger magnetic field in the planet’s past, or whether some of the magnetization we see today could instead be induced by its much weaker present-day field. Their results suggest that, depending on the iron content and magnetic properties of Mercury’s crust, the present-day field may explain a substantial portion of the magnetic signals observed by MESSENGER. 

The possibility that Mercury’s present-day field explains much of the observed crustal magnetization raises new questions that BepiColombo, the newest mission to Mercury, will soon be able to explore in much greater detail. How much of Mercury’s crustal magnetization truly records an ancient, stronger core magnetic field? How do different geological units, their iron content, and their magnetic properties contribute to the signals we observe? And what role have craters and the impacts that formed them played in shaping Mercury’s magnetic crust? BepiColombo’s observations will offer a new opportunity to test these ideas and build a clearer picture of Mercury’s magnetic history. 

Read the full UBC Science article here: Researchers identify class of “oddball” meteorite that killed the dinosaurs 

Research published in Science Advances earlier this month investigates the mysterious origins of the meteorite responsible for wiping out non-avian dinosaurs 66-million years ago. The international research team included scientists from Université de Paris Cité, University of Vienna, and Vrije Universiteit Brussels, including Dr. Philippe Claeys, who is currently visiting the Pacific Centre for Isotopic and Geochemical Research with Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at UBC. 

The meteorite belonged to a group known as carbonaceous chondrites – a broad class with diverse elemental properties, leaving the origins of the meteorite largely unknown. Previous studies proposed that the meteorite might have contained high concentrations of sulfur, similar to some meteorites commonly found on Earth. Under this hypothesis, sulfur released during the impact would have played a central role in the severity of the resulting mass extinction. 

The researchers dove deeper into the meteorite composition by using advanced nickel-isotope analyses on samples from the thin layer of impact debris deposited around the globe. They found that the meteorite contained little volatile material. Sulphur therefore couldn’t be the expected “smoking gun,” shared Dr. Philippe Claeys. “The fine debris thrown into the atmosphere would have been the primary factor.”  

Meteorites with this non-volatile carbonaceous-chondrite composition only make up a tiny fraction of the meteorites ever sampled on earth, not to mention being 10-15 km wide, make it truly exceptional. “Being impacted by such a rare, distant projectile really underscores how unlucky the dinosaurs were,” says Dr. Claeys.  

The meteorite’s exact origin remains uncertain. Potential sources including debris from the outer Solar System or the region of the asteroid belt near Jupiter. Studying the composition of the dust the meteorite left behind helps scientist get closer to this answer.  

Dr. Shaun Barker, Director of the Mineral Deposit Research Unit (MDRU) and Associate Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at UBC, is featured in a recent interview with Dr. Brett Davis in Coring Magazine, a quarterly international publication focusing on exploration core drilling.

In the conversation, Dr. Barker reflects on the path that led him into geology, from childhood fascinations with dinosaurs and fossils to formative university field experiences and mentorship that shaped his career. He also discusses his current research interests, including the controls on the formation of copper and gold deposits, mineral system footprints, ore body knowledge, and the development of new technologies in geology. The interview explores the importance of collaboration between academia and industry, the fundamental scientific questions that continue to drive mineral deposit research, and the challenges he has encountered and the solutions he has developed throughout his career. Along the way, Dr. Barker also shares his favorite rocks, dinosaurs, as well as geological discoveries that inspire his enthusiasm for Earth science.

Read the full article here: In conversation with Shaun Barker

Written in collaboration with Gary Fung. 

This May, Dr. Maya Kopylova and PhD student Gary Fung from the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) went on a two week geological excursion to eastern Paraguay to investigate the origin of alluvial diamonds in the Capiibary area, an Atlantic Forest region in northeastern Paraguay. The fieldwork was strenuous, consisting of trekking through the jungle to reach sites over 40 sites where diamonds had previously been recovered, or to potential diamond source areas in upstream tributaries and floodplains to gather clues on where these stones came from. They sieved and panned stream sediments to retrieve heavy mineral concentrates (e.g., zircon, ilmenite and chromite), and eventually, were rewarded with two ~2mm diamonds found on site. Additional diamond samples were purchased from garimpeiros (artisanal miners) to supplement the research. 

Back at UBC, Gary conducts detailed laboratory analyses to reveal the detrital history and provenance of these mysteriously sourced diamonds. By examining their morphology, physical and chemical characteristics, and tiny mineral inclusions trapped during growth deep within the Earth, the research team hopes to identify their source and better understand where in the mantle domain the diamonds originally crystalized. This work, titled “Dual origin of alluvial diamonds from Capiibary, Paraguay”, will be presented at Goldschmidt 2026. 

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The project was conducted in partnership with the Faculty of Engineering of the National University of Asunción (FIUNA). Maya and Gary delivered lectures and met with faculties and students at FIUNA, sharing information about UBC’s geology and geological engineering programs, as well as the fundamentals of diamond characterization and exploration. Gary thanks his collaborators, Dr. Jaime Presser and Prof. Fernando Larroza, and the project funders at EduCanada and the Geological Society of America for their support. He is grateful to many Paraguayans whose hospitality made the fieldwork possible, and who warmly shared chipa guasu (a traditional dish) during their visit!  

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