Funding was awarded to Genevieve Ali through Environment Canada’s Lake Winnipeg Basin Initiative to conduct research on the “delineation of areas that contribute to nutrient transport in near-level landscapes within Lake Winnipeg Watershed”. Indeed, runoff is particularly difficult to calculate in Prairie basins because the areas contributing to downstream flows are limited and highly variable in space and time. Significant work on contributing and non-contributing areas has been done in the Prairie Pothole Region but not in flat Prairie landscapes where hydrologic connectivity is controlled by sheet flow on frozen ground, water losses in high infiltration capacity soils, and enhanced drainage via man-made structures. A PhD student, Maliheh Rabie, will deploy hydrometric instruments in selected watersheds in Manitoba and develop a dynamic model of overland flow connectivity toward a time-dependent delineation of contributing areas in the downstream portion of the Lake Winnipeg Watershed. She will also develop a better understanding of the movement of nutrients through near-level watersheds as a function of variable contributing areas. Maliheh will be working under the umbrella of the Watershed Systems Research Program while being co-advised by Genevieve Ali (University of Manitoba) and Chris Spence (Environment Canada/National Hydrology Research Centre, University of Saskatchewan).
