2022 LTER All Scientists' Meeting

Dr. Nandita Basu

Dr. Nandita Basu is a Professor of Global Water Sustainability and Ecohydrology, jointly appointed between the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Waterloo. She is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Hydrology, Director of the Collaborative Water Program at the University of Waterloo, elected Member of the Royal Society College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and an Earth Leadership Fellow.

Nandita Basu is internationally renowned in the fields of water sustainability and ecohydrology, where her team has laid critical groundwork to address both fundamental science and applied management questions on nutrient pollution in anthropogenic landscapes. She is an environmental engineer, who uses data science, process modeling and remote sensing to explore how climate, land use, and management impacts surface and groundwater quality across agricultural, urban and forested landscapes, and from watershed to the regional and global scales. Her research leverages these insights to develop watershed management strategies that maximizes environmental benefits without significant economic costs.

National and international collaboration has extended the reach and impact of Dr. Basu’s work. She leads a $2.4M Tri-agency project that connects hydrologists, biogeochemists, ecologists and economists with stakeholders across Canada to develop approaches for managing the water quality of lake basins. She co-leads a $1.7M EU Joint Programming Initiative project to expand this work globally, connecting Waterloo with academic experts from Sweden, Denmark and Portugal. Dr. Basu has served on many advisory and technical committees, including the International Joint Commissions’ Science Advisory Board – Science Priority Committee, established under the Canada-USA Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.