Trent University Environment and Resource Science

Food insecurity is becoming a growing issue within the city of Peterborough. Food insecurity can be generally defined as having a lack of physical and economic access to an adequate quantity of both affordable and nutritious food. Nourish is a non-profit organization in Peterborough which seeks to improve food security within the Peterborough community by determining a single method which can be used to measure local homegrown garden harvests, in a project known as "How Much Can We Grow". Information that can be collected from the chosen method is significant as it can help determine to what extent homegrown gardens are contributing to improving food security within the area, and encourage more individuals to become involved with gardening in the future. The following report will discuss the research results for the project and will cover the social benefits of gardening, motivations for gardening, and a single method that can be applied to the Peterborough area for measuring garden harvests. These results are based primarily on local survey responses, for a survey which was distributed throughout the Peterborough community.

Precipitation gauges have historically been a valuable asset for surface water monitoring (Tokay et al​, 2010), as well as predicting climatic change and seasonal variation (Grieser, 2015). This study will focus on the performances of three precipitation gauges at the Trent Climate Station in Peterborough, Ontario. The motivation of this project is to evaluate the potential of the new Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (OMNRF) precipitation gauge for its provincial surface water monitoring network. We will evaluate the effectiveness of the new OMNRF gauge by comparing it to the data gathered from Trent's established gauges, the Tipping bucket and GEONOR models. In doing so, we hope to provide insight on whether the new model of gauge is an improvement, equivalent, or less reliable when compared with the established models. We will compare reliability, ease of use, and potential applications in order to help determine the benefits and drawbacks of the new gauge.

This project was developed for the Northumberland Land Trust (NLT) to assess and determine the suitability of the Laurie Lawson Education Centre property in Cobourg; for possible salamander introduction. In the initial research for this project many experts and expert literature sources were consulted to develop methods of assessment and to layout our onsite research. From this research we established that there are many factors which might affect survival of salamanders in an established population, and that would affect the suitability of habitat for translocation of salamanders. The substantial number of vernal pools on the property was the main reason for the Northumberland Land Trust's request for research and an assessment into the property's suitability.