Strategic Plan

Our goal is to provide our undergraduate students with opportunities for authentic research experiences, create an environment where student research is encouraged, mentored, and celebrated, align our undergraduate programs with graduate program opportunities, and ensure that undergraduate education and specialisations meet the needs of employers.

Rationale: Undergraduate student engagement in scholarly and applied research is foundational to the student experience – it unleashes discovery and helps students develop skill sets outside the normal classroom setting

that are in high demand by employers and graduate schools. Strengthening the undergraduate student research experience will also help build program reputation, improve student recruitment and retention, support research, and provide a pool of highly qualified students to enter our graduate degree programs. Meeting this goal directly helps the Department fulfill its mission in that it equips the next generation of scholars, practitioners, and leaders with the skills, resolve, and opportunities to tackle some of our greatest societal and environmental challenges.

Progress: The Department has made substantial progress in undergraduate student engagement in applied and scholarly research opportunities. We have engaged students through our participation in the First Year Research Experience (FYRE) program; we have developed courses with applied field research components and international and experiential learning; we also offer supervised research projects at the senior undergraduate level – normally through Honours degree programs. For example, we replaced an outdated Environmental Earth Science BSc program with a professionally accredited B.Sc. Hydrology degree program. Moreover, we established a collaborative undergraduate offering focused on human health in changing environments is now established within the B.A.Sc. Health Studies program, and we have established a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) initiative with a planning program at a Mexican university). Most recently, an MOU has been signed with the University for Peace in Costa Rica to expand on a joint GEOG 400/800 course in local water security taught at UPeace, the Department has supported the Computer Science Department redesign of their undergraduate programs by jointly developing a Geomatics stream in their Applied Computing program, and a study abroad field course on urban design and transportation planning is set for its first delivery in 2022/23 in one of the most bikeable cities in the world, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We also engage our students in different research projects with other international undergraduate students from across the world (e.g., India, China, England, Ukraine) through funding opportunities offered by Mitacs and other organizations.

Guidepost: • Integrate research experiences in 200- and 300-level courses; • Increase student senior- year research projects across all three undergraduate programs; • Enhance program promotion and student recruitment through new marketing strategies; • Increase student research project opportunities across undergraduate program specializations, including access for students external to the Department; • Engage research and community partners in the Department’s annual undergraduate student research celebration event to showcase undergraduate student research.

To fulfill the Department’s mission, our goal is to mobilize our data, knowledge, and predictive capabilities to help our partners in the public sector and Indigenous communities effectively manage key challenges such as sustainable development and climate change.

Rationale: Research and teaching in the Department focuses on observing, predicting, and managing coupled human-environment systems. In doing so, the Department focuses on understanding changes in the natural and built environment, predicting environmental change, and advancing decision-making intelligence to mitigate and manage risks to human and natural systems. A key motivation of the Department’s research is to advance global sustainability and social and environmental justice. Fulfilling the Department’s mission requires high-quality student experiences and training to develop advanced skill sets (quantitative and/or qualitative) that underpin assessments and modelling of coupled human-environmental systems. Toolsets such as GIS, remote sensing, and spatial modelling are in high demand in the planning, environmental, and health sectors, among others, and core to preparing our graduates for successful careers.

Progress: The Department has existing strengths in remote sensing and GIS, with expertise in such areas as grassland remote sensing, human spatial cognition, navigation, and transportation and urban planning. A key need for the Department to achieve its mission is intellectual leadership in geospatial intelligence – the measurement, management, analysis, and display of spatial information about the physical and built environment. Geospatial intelligence is core to emerging research across campus, including hydrology (e.g., new sensors and methods for measuring and forecasting water quality and quantity), One Health (e.g., analysis and projection of infectious disease distribution), mineral and energy resources (e.g., facility siting, scenario analysis), and Indigenous land use (e.g., traditional use, cultural interaction), to name a few. Missing from our faculty complement is teaching and research leadership in such areas as big (spatial) data, data visualization, spatial statistics, and land use modelling. Compared to institutions such as University of Alberta, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Manitoba, for example, we lag in geospatial science teaching and research capacity.

Guidepost: • Increased student research opportunities in geospatial intelligence (e.g. GIS, remote sensing, spatial modelling, data visualization) across all three undergraduate degree programs; • Enhanced undergraduate research experiences; • Tenure-track faculty position to lead innovative research in geospatial intelligence and bridge research across campus through the use and application of spatial toolsets; • Enhanced graduate training opportunities in geospatial science research and applications.

Our department is renowned for providing international leadership in state-of-the-art field programs to understand and predict changes and challenges in the mountains, the prairies, and in cities, towns, and communities around the world.

Rationale: Devising novel strategies for environmental and community planning requires foundational efforts to observe, predict, and understand coupled human-environment systems. Field-based programs are essential in both undergraduate and graduate programs to provide experiential-based learning opportunities to understand changes and challenges in natural and built environments. Field-based programs are also essential in our Department’s research programs to provide the process understanding (theory) that underpins mechanistic models of coupled human-environment systems. To continue being “the University that the world needs” requires effectively integrating field science across all aspects of our research and teaching – thoughtful succession planning is needed to ensure that our Department’s international leadership in state-of-the-art field programs is sustained for the following decades.

Progress: The Department is renowned for its strong field programs in hydrometeorology and ecohydrology. For decades, the Department has focused on advancing the theory and practice of hydrology as a physical environmental science, emphasizing research and training related to improving descriptions and explanations of the natural and human factors which control the quantity and quality of water resources. A jewel of the Department is the Canadian Rockies Hydrological Observatory, located in the Canadian Rocky Mountains in the headwaters of the Saskatchewan River Basin, which was built – and is sustained – to improve understanding and prediction of hydrometeorological, ecological, and cryospheric phenomena. The field-based research programs in the Department are now supported through the Global Water Futures Observatories program, a nine-University effort to sustain an integrated system of research stations across the country that are critical to understanding, predicting, and tracking the health of our water. Sustaining field science in the Department requires deliberate efforts in faculty renewal to develop the next generation of field scientists that can substantially advance our understanding of coupled human-environment systems.

Guidepost: • Tenure-track faculty position to lead innovative observing programs that advance understanding of coupled human-environment systems; • Enhanced undergraduate and graduate training opportunities in field science

Our goal is to establish innovative and collaborative graduate programming to improve our brand and provide clear pathways to globally relevant interdisciplinary expertise.

Rationale: The University is ranked number one in Canada for water research, with much of this strength in our Department. Additionally, our strengths intersect with planning and management of the built and natural environment, including natural resources management and assessment, planning and design, human health and wellbeing, and Indigenous partnerships. Both water resources and environment and planning graduate programming provide opportunities to establish innovative programming involving partnerships beyond our department. There is a growing national and international appetite for innovations in graduate education, including micro-credentials so that students can more effectively tailor their education to suit their specific needs, innovations in experiential online education, and high-profile graduate certificate programs that have reach well beyond the University community. New programming in these areas will increase both the calibre and number of graduate students who will be trained in a combination of critical thinking, community engagement, applied research, geospatial/planning tools, and methods to equip them to engage in transdisciplinary problem solving.

Progress: Graduate students apply to our existing programs from around the world. We are engaged in ongoing conversations with SENS, GIWS, and the College to develop innovative and collaborative water resources graduate programming across campus to train students in such areas as hydrology, watershed planning, and water and health, to name a few. The Department has recently launched two graduate certificates: the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Planning, designed for both career professionals and individuals wanting to complement their current skillsets or postsecondary training; and the Graduate Certificate in Hydrology designed for those currently working, or wanting to work, in both applied water resources fields and water science institutions.

Guidepost: • Tenure-track faculty position in field science to understand changes in hydrological processes in traditional territories through interweaving traditional and scientific knowledge • Tenure track faculty position planning for Indigenous communities, advancing considerations of environmental stewardship, and climate change in environmental and community planning • Tenure-track faculty position in Earth System change to advance research and teaching on how changes in energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles affect the environment, human health, food and energy security, and economic activity; • Tenure-track faculty position to lead innovative research and graduate student supervision in geospatial science; • Partnerships with public and private sector organizations, local communities, and Indigenous communities, organizations, and governments that foster capacity building, innovation, and knowledge exchange; • Partnerships with international organizations to address scholarly and societal challenges on global sustainability.

Our goal is to continue to strengthen Indigenous and community-engaged scholarship in our teaching and research activity across both the social and natural sciences.

Rationale: Indigenization and community-engaged scholarship are priorities of both the University and College plans and the College is seeking to increase its Indigenous faculty complement. Our department is also committed to community engaged scholarship as a means to solve societal and environmental challenges faced locally, provincially, nationally, and internationally. Reflecting the breadth of research activity in our department, we define community broadly as a group with diverse characteristics who share common perspectives and engage in joint action in geographical locations or other settings and may include local communities and both the public and private sector.

Progress: We now have two senior undergraduate courses approved to meet the College’s Indigenous learning requirement (one in Planning and one in Geography). Several of our faculty are also engaged in funded research in formal partnership with Indigenous communities, addressing pressing challenges related to water resources, renewable energy development, sustainable housing and transportation, and healthy communities – to name a few. The department updated its standards for tenure and promotion, and standards for merit, in 2019 to explicitly recognize and reward community engaged scholarship and outreach. Our Department has provided campus leadership in integrating community-based methodologies into the social sciences, with a strong focus on Indigenous communities to operationalize our commitment to Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge systems. We now need to focus on advancing the integration of Indigenous ways of knowing into the natural sciences and expand its integration in planning.

Guidepost: • Indigenous faculty comprising at least two of our proposed tenure-track positions, including the proposed faculty position to understand changes in hydrological processes in traditional territories and the proposed faculty position on planning for Indigenous communities; • Increased support for Indigenous graduate students and graduate students collaborating with Indigenous communities.