Environmental and Earth Sciences

Arctic Science, Geography, Geology, Oceanography, Hydrology, Glaciology, Seismology, Meteorology, Climate Science, Limnology, Remote Sensing, Natural Resources, Mining, Green Tech, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Development, Archeology, Paleontology

Three books about machine learning

Matt Hall Environmental and Earth Sciences
I recently finished a Udemy machine learning course, and wrote on LinkedIn afterwards: “While I am no [machine learning] expert, this is one step on the way to better skills with [Python]”. So which other steps have I taken along that route to learn more about machine learning?Here I share my thoughts on three books; two of which I have read cover to cover, and the third which I can hardly put down! When students…

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It Takes a Village: Writing a Book

Sarah Boon Biology and Life Sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences
It Takes a Village: Writing a Book In the past few weeks I’ve been working on my book proposal. That’s right, I’m writing a non-fiction book about my field research adventures as a woman in science. It’s designed for readers interested in outdoor adventure, science, and women in science, and focuses on my work on snow and ice and climate change in the Arctic, Rockies, north Coast Mountain, and in the Interior of British Columbia.…

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Will Water Continue to Supply Us?

savi Environmental and Earth Sciences, Technology and Engineering
 During my first year as an Environmental Engineering student, I took a course called "Earth Engineering." It was mainly about soil mechanics, yet the first lesson discussed the natural resources left on this earth, and how humans use them everyday. The most surprising fact was the amount of freshwater on our planet, which is barely anything!! As the years go by, experts keep warning us about the arising water scarcity problem. We have already heard…

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Openness is a two-way street

Matt Hall Environmental and Earth Sciences
Last week the Data Analysis Study Group of the SPE Gulf Coast Section announced a new machine learning contest (I’m afraid registration is now closed, even though the contest has not started yet). The task is to predict shear-wave sonic from other logs, similar to the SPWLA PDDA contest last year. This is a valuable problem in the subsurface, because shear sonic log is essential for computing elastic properties of rocks and therefore in predicting…

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Bugs on Ice, A Quest To Find Insects in the Upper Lillooet Provincial Park

chloevanloon Biology and Life Sciences, Communication, Education and Outreach, Environmental and Earth Sciences
Mid August of 2020 myself and the insect-obsessed hubby went on three day backpacking trip in Southwest British Columbia with two goals. The first goal was to search for insects on the snow banks in and around the Upper Lillooet Provincial Park boundary. The second goal was to see if this route we would take would be a viable way to reach Silt Lake, located at the headwaters of the Lillooet River (at the top…

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Illuminated equations

Matt Hall Environmental and Earth Sciences
Last year I wrote a post about annotated equations, and why they are useful teaching tools. But I never shared all the cool examples people tweeted back, and some of them are too good not to share.Let’s start with this one from Andrew Alexander that he uses to explain complex number notation: Paige Bailey tweeted some examples of annotated equations and code from the reinforcement learning tutorial, Building a Powerful DQN in TensorFlow by Sebastian…

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Pseudoarchaeology at the Capitol

Steph Halmhofer Biology and Life Sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences, General Science
Title image: one of my favourite quotes from Arnold 2006 If you’ve read any of my blog posts about pseudoarchaeology (A, B, C, and D for example), or read any of my pop culture reviews involving pseudoarchaeology (A and B for example), or maybe even been able to catch one of the talks I’ve given about pseudoarchaeology (like A), you’ll notice a few common themes. Firstly, I talk a lot about the dangers of pseudoarchaeology…

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Our “why”

Amanda Tracey Biology and Life Sciences, Communication, Education and Outreach, Environmental and Earth Sciences
2020 was a difficult year for everyone. It was challenging. It was tragic. At some points it didn’t even seem real. The beginning of a multi-year pandemic, locust swarms in Africa, and fires devastating Australia are just a subset of the terrible turns that 2020 took. Implications for field biologists ranged from minor to significant. With many universities and institutions closed, some projects were put on hold or cancelled. Work was only permitted if considered…

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Coal and Water in Alberta

Sarah Boon Biology and Life Sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences
The Alberta government has decided to open up new mountaintop removal mining coal leases on the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, rescinding Coal Policy protections that have been in place since the 1970s, in a bid to inject funds into an economy that’s struggling from low oil prices and the pandemic. The latest proposal is the Grassy Mountain project, designed to extract coal for making steel (not generating power). It is located in the…

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A crack in the green: when ecosystem services become drivers of inequality in cities

Caroline Tucker & Marc Cadotte Biology and Life Sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences
Guest post by Marylouisse Feliciano, recent MEnvSc Graduate from the University of Toronto-ScarboroughCan health-related ecosystem services actually increase health inequality? What does the uneven distribution and varying quality of urban green spaces say about social justice in urban environments? Not all park spaces and green spaces are created equal. As urbanization marches forward, steps have to be taken to address inequalities and prevent this pattern from continuing.  Health, urbanization, and parks: what we know             Nature…

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