At the University of Calgary, the Applied Geochemistry Group has an opening for a postdoctoral scholar. This is a full-time position with the option to work in-person, or hybrid (or a combination of both) for up to 1 year (with potential for extension) with a preferred start date in early 2025. The ideal candidate combines experience in groundwater quality assessments with expertise in geospatial analyses and statistics.
The project investigates the causes of decadal-scale changes in groundwater quality in Alberta. The successful candidate will use approaches including statistical and geospatial analyses of provincial-scale groundwater quality and land use datasets from the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) to identify land use impacts on the quality of shallow groundwater. The Investigations will focus on areas where increasing trends in nitrate and chloride have been found in shallow groundwater (<150 m). In combination with isotopic and geochemical data, the research team led by the post-doc will assess where anthropogenic impacts on shallow groundwater have occurred and which land use changes have facilitated change.
The science is enabled by a provincial-scale historical groundwater quality dataset with over >6M results and the ABMI Human Footprint Inventory with >5M polygons delineated for >100 feature types from SPOT6 satellite imagery. Human footprint occupies 31% of Alberta, with agriculture covering 21%. Most of the human footprint in central and southern Alberta is a result of the province’s farming legacy since the late 1800s. Previous studies in Alberta have shown the effects of agricultural land use on shallow groundwater contaminants including local changes in nitrate and chloride concentrations where confined animal feeding operations impacted groundwater quality from manure application at the land surface. While a province-wide picture of groundwater quality variations is emerging very recently, there has not yet an analysis of how temporal trends relate to land use changes throughout the last decades.
