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Springtime for those of us that study ecology is typically a busy and exciting time. In the Fedy Lab of Wildlife and Molecular Ecology most of our research focuses on birds. So springtime means ducks are arriving from their southern habitats, song birds are singing, and grouse are displaying and mating. That also means that after months of preparation my students and I are finally back in the field.

One sunny day in the early 1990s the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Jim Soorley, was gazing down from an airplane as he flew over Moreton Bay, halfway up Australia’s east coast. He noticed a discolouration of the water where the Brisbane River entered the bay – a dark plume that extended out into the bay. He pointed out the plume to his travelling companion and asked him what caused it. His travelling companion was probably the best person in the world to answer that question – Bill Dennison from the University of Queensland.

Appalled by the inhuman failures of modern architecture and planning, critics such as Jane Jacobs reflected on the capacity of traditional, vernacular, unplanned and organic development to produce pleasing, diverse and human scale architectural designs and townscapes.

Rationally speaking, there is a broad scientific consensus on the human causes of climate change, yet we have not managed to deal with it in practical terms. There is a dismaying lack of progress on many environmental issues despite the passage of almost fifty years since the inception of the environmental movement.

In a World Water Day Op Ed article for The Globe and Mail, Sarah Wolfe wrote about the connection between emotions and water.

On June 8, another World's Oceans Day (WOD) came and went without a lot of fanfare. Even so, WOD’s a good reminder that Canada is an ocean nation. That might seem pretty abstract at times for those of us living in southern Ontario. With three oceans (*can you name them?) and the world’s longest coast - all 244,000 beautiful kilometres of coast - we owe it to ourselves to pay more attention to 'life below water'.

I should begin with a disclaimer, I did not have a one on one evening with Jane Goodall. It was more like me and a few hundred of my closest friends. But the entire evening had this intimate feeling and Dr. Goodall herself had a way of connecting with each and every person in the audience.

I love food. I am just as likely to get excited about Hallowe’en candy as I am about a home-cooked meal or trying a local specialty when travelling.

I’ve recently returned from a one-week workshop in Patagonian Argentina, and it’s been a source of reflection on what it is we do in SERS that seemed well suited to a “SERS Story”.

The most rewarding and impactful research of my career has been of this kind. When I’m lucky, I have the privilege to witness moments of transformative transdisciplinarity.