There's $453,000 in funding going to five UNBC researchers from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
The bulk of the Discovery Grants Program funding goes to Stephen Dery, who studies atmospheric and terrestrial rivers of Western Canada in transition. Dery gets $175,000 to help better understand the role mountains play in the hydrology of coast mountain watersheds. His research team includes five undergraduate students, three graduate students, and one post-doctoral fellow.
Che Elkin's work is on evaluating the role of local and landscape factors on the resilience of mixed-species forest ecosystems under climate uncertainty. He gets $120,000, which will support research examining how trees and forests respond to shifting environmental conditions, and what this means for forest ecosystem services. His research team will include graduate and undergraduate students.
Art Fredeen gets $120,000 to investigate the limitations to sub-boreal forest growth and carbon sequestration from tree to forest scale before and after natural and anthropogenic (human influence) disturbances.
These grants are for five-year studies.
Lian Chen will receive $18,000 to study a new deep-learning structure for one year, while Pranesh Kumar gets $10,000 for each of two years, for his research, which looks at the role statistical regression models play in data analysis.
"The opportunity for our students, even at the undergraduate level, to conduct research with our outstanding faculty is one of the best recruiting tools we have," said Daniel Weeks, UNBC president. "I congratulate the researchers on their success. The work they do is critical in furthering our knowledge of issues that have an impact on a global scale, and enhances our ability to devise solutions to the problems those issues may present."
The university's success rate for getting Discovery Grants is at 57 per cent while other small universities in the nation sit at 43 per cent.
