Congratulations Stacey Strilesky and Graham Clark recipients of Queen Elizabeth II Scholarships in Science and Technology. The QEII-GSST Program encourages excellence in graduate studies in science and technology at the master’s and doctoral levels. It is a merit-based scholarship. Awards are available to students in the science and technology disciplines only.
Stacey Strilesky
Supervisor – Dr. Elyn Humphreys
Stacey Lynne Strilesky completed Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees at Carleton University where her undergraduate research explored cryoplanation terraces in the Yukon and her graduate research focused on carbon cycling in peatlands. She then transitioned into a several year stint in international research program administration at the University of Alberta. She has lived and traveled extensively throughout Canada and her forays abroad include a year residing in the German countryside to further develop her German language skills. Her academic area of interest is the reclamation of large tracts of land after open-pit mining of the oil sands in northern Alberta, Canada where an important aspect of reclamation from a regulatory perspective is the assessment of whether or not reclaimed landscapes have been returned to pre-disturbance land use capability. The research objectives are to understand how forest ecosystem form (e.g., plant cover) and function (e.g., cycling of carbon) are integrated into the current regulatory framework and then investigate the role that techniques for assessing the functioning of an ecosystem may contribute to the appraisal process. Analysis of the exchange of carbon dioxide and water between the ecosystem and the atmosphere using the eddy covariance technique is of particular interest as a method for assessing the functional capability of reclaimed landscapes.
