Department of Geography and PlanningEvan Koncewicz, co-supervised by Drs. Laura Thomson and Melissa Lafreniere, successfully defended his MSc thesis entitled "Characterization of dissolved fluvial carbon fluxes from landscape characteristics across High Arctic headwater streams" September 21, 2021.
Evan's thesis examined the concentration of fluvial dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) across High Arctic streams in order to understand how landscape characteristics affect the natural fluxes of fluvial carbon in watersheds in the Northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago (NCAA). He used GIS and remote sensing data to derive the landscape characteristics (e.g. watershed area, slope, stream order, vegetation cover and geology, among others) for the watersheds corresponding to146 stream DOC/DIC sampling locations. He then applied multivariate statistical analyses to explore if there were statistical models that could quantify the relationships between key landscape characteristics and DOC/DIC concentrations. Vegetation was determined to be a key control of DOC concentrations while the presence of limestone and evaporite lithologies, were determined to be key controls of DIC concentrations.