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>> The project is fundamentally associated with developing awareness of water as a resource,
and in fact water as a very valuable resource that we need
to perhaps spend a little more time thinking about.
And it's very difficult to do that without really having an understanding
of how water moves through our hydrologic cycle.
And this is a means by which we can educate people.
But the focus of all this is on watersheds, and eventually the protection
and the sustainability of these watersheds.
The project and the specific funding by RBC is really to help us get things off the ground
in terms of instrumentation and natural measurements
that we can take during the course of a year in the watershed.
Then those measurements would include things like water levels, precipitation,
and the way water moves through the watershed.
>> One of the things that's important to me for -- even for recreation are -- is clean water.
I'm a diver, I've been diving for a lot of years now.
And it's really nice to go into an area that's clean, that's pristine,
that you can see the underwater life as it should be, without a lot of pollution,
without a lot of invasive species, and so forth.
And part of maintaining that is maintaining a healthy watershed.
People use watersheds for recreation, but they also use them for making a living.
Some people fish, some people use it for agriculture, for irrigation.
And we really need to be protecting that,
in order to create strong communities for the future.
So I see it when I go out to have fun, to dive, to be in the water and so forth.
But it's also part of what I do in my career.
>> One of the best things about the program is the field work that we get to do.
So Queen's owns a couple of sites around Kingston.
Each year the geology students get to go out,
and they get to do some real life geology on the actual field sites.
And it's really valuable, because you can only learn so much in a class,
especially in something like geology where it is field-based.
So when the students come out here, then they get to try something new,
and they get to really practice what they've learned in the classroom.
This is the Kennedy site, so it's owned by the civil department.
And what we're doing here is a bunch of hydrogeological work,
so we're testing extreme flow rates, we're installing zometers, groundwater wells,
we're monitoring seepage, and we're studying groundwater service water interactions,
so lots of really interesting applied things.
>> Well a lot of geology that you do in the work field is based in the field,
especially a a young geologist -- a junior geologist.
I've done this as a summer job, which is why I'm doing it today.
And we do a lot of mapping within the department as well.
We do a lot of field work actually, it's one of the greater aspects of this department,
I think, one of our definite strengths.
I love it.
>> Well this grant is really going to be able to allow us to build a program
that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise.
It's a program we've been wanting to build for quite some time,
and it's something that there is a demand.
But funding this kind of thing can be difficult,
and this will really give us the building blocks to build on that program.
It's a long-term project with RBC as a partner.
It's going to be over 10 years, but it will allow us to put in the different pieces
to build outreach programs, research programs themselves,
and then educational opportunities for our students.
>> I would like to thank RBC most profoundly for this opportunity.
This grant is a -- an enabling grant in terms of the ability to get out to people
and educate them about watershed issues.
And there are so many watershed issues that most people just --
they read about it in their newspaper but don't really understand,
and this gives us the opportunity to bring in the local school kids to learn
about those issues in real fashion.
So RBC has made this available to us, there is no other way that we could
in fact find money to do this kind of thing.
This is a very, very unique opportunity, and we're very grateful to RBC for providing this.