Dr. Ian Spooner

Director of Research, KC Irving
Environmental Science Centre

Coordinator, M.Sc. Applied Geomatics

Manager, Morton Centre

Location: HSH 325

Ian Spooner

Ian Spooner (P. Geo, Ph.D.) has been a professor at Acadia in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science for the past 26 years. He has supervised 30 Masters and 48 B.Sc. Honours theses to date. His primary research interest is investigating environmental change and he has active research programs in northwestern British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. He also has consulted in the areas of Environmental and Risk Assessment, groundwater and surface water contamination, coastal erosion and has been involved in environmental risk assessments for resource companies in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and British Columbia. He has served with a number of professional organizations and was recently awarded the Distinguished Service Award by the Atlantic Geoscience Society and the Acadia Faculty of Pure and Applied Science Teaching Award.

Education
Scholarly interests
Teaching
Funding and Awards (since 2015)
Published and Accepted Papers (since 2015)

Education
Ph.D. University of Calgary (Geoscience) 1994. Quaternary Environmental Change in the Stikine Plateau Region of North-western British Columbia.
M.Sc. Queen's University (Geology)1988. Applied Sedimentological Evaluation of a Glacial Deposit, Joyceville, Ontario.
B.Sc (Honours) Queen’s University (Geology). 1984

Scholarly interests
Environmental Change in lake and wetland sediments
Applied Physical Limnology
Surface water – Groundwater Interaction

Undergraduate Teaching
ENVS 3423 Environmental Impact Assessment
ENVS 3513 Climate Change for Environmental Practitioners
ENVS 4423 Senior Seminar
GEOL 3723 Hydrogeology
GEOL 4723 Quaternary Geology
GEOL 4843 Energy Sources in the Earth Sciences

Field Schools: ENVS 2523 & GEOL 2083

Graduate Teaching
GEOL 5703 Quaternary Paleoecology
GEOL 5923 Special topics in Geology

Recent Funding
2019 MITACS Accelerate Award: Application of paleolimnological tools for assessing the transfer of marine derived nutrients and toxins to fresh water systems, Nova Scotia Canada: Focus on Alewife within the Gaspereau Lake watershed.
2018 NSERC Discovery Grant: Arsenic in Lakes in Nova Scotia 2018 -2024
2018 NSERC CREATE funding for ASPIRE (Aquatic Systems Professional and Industrial Training for the Restoration Economy, Dr. Rob Jamieson, Principal applicant), I Spooner collaborator.
2018 Nova Scotia Lands Research Grant: Tracking contamination in Sitmu’k, Pictou Landing First Nation, Nova Scotia 2018-2019.
2018 NSERC Engage Award: Impacts of watershed development and environmental change on Lakes in Cape Breton Regional Municipality
2017 Acadia University Research Fund (Article 25.55). Environmental Change in lakes.
2017 Nova Scotia Lands Research Grant: Tracking contamination in Boat Harbour, Pictou, Nova Scotia 2017-2019.

Published and Accepted Papers (since 2018)

2021. Application of the paleolimnological method to assess metal contaminant distribution (As, Cu, Pb, Zn) in pulp mill stabilization basin sediments, Nova Scotia, Canada. K. B. Davidson, B. E.J. Holmes, I. S. Spooner, D. W. Dunnington, T. R. Walker, C.B. Lake  and C-C Su.  ESPR-D-20-15062 Environmental Science and Pollution Research. In press.

2021. tidypaleo: Visualizing Paleoenvironmental Archives Using ggplot2. D. W. Dunnington, N. Libera, J. Kurek, I. S. Spooner, G. A. Gagnon. Journal of Statistical Software. In  Press

2020. Evaluating the performance of calculated elemental measures in sediment archives. D. W. Dunnington, B R.B. Gregory, I. S Spooner C. E. White; G. A. Gagnon. JOPL-0-19-00032R1

2020. Assessment of metal(oid) concentrations using diffusive gradient thin (DGT) films in marine, freshwater and wetland aquatic ecosystems impacted by industrial effluents. M Chaudhury, M. Quanz, J. Williams, E. Maltby, K. Oakes, I Spooner, T. Walker. Case Studies in Chemical and Environmental Engineering.

2020. Characterizing Sediment Physical Property Variability for Bench Scale Dewatering Purposes. *M. Alimohammadi, *H. Tackley, *B. Holmes, *K. Davidson, C. B. Lake, I. S. Spooner, R. C. Jamieson, T. R. Walker, Environmental Geotechnics. Accepted ENVGEO-D19-00214

2020. The distribution and potential impact of two centuries of lead deposition as recorded by lake sediments from northeastern North America. *D. W. Dunnington S. Roberts; S. A Norton; I. S Spooner; J. Kurek; J. L. Kirk; D. Muir; C. E. White; G. A. Gagnon. STOTEN-D-20-05912  Science of the Total Environment

2019. Evaluating the utility of elemental measurements obtained from factory-calibrated field-portable X-Ray fluorescence units for aquatic sediments.  *D. W. Dunnington I.S. Spooner M. L. Mallory, C. E. White, G.A. Gagnon.  Environmental Pollution; 249: 45-53 doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2019.03.001

2019. Correlates of Waterbody Characteristics and the Occurrence or Diversity of Larval Amphibians in Central Ontario, Canada. *A. L. Loder, R. Weeber, S. N. P. Wong, I. S. Spooner and Mark L. Mallory. Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00128-019-02698-8.

2019. Effect of different sediment dewatering techniques on subsequent particle sizes in industrial derived effluent. *Alimohammadi, M; Tackley, H., Lake, C., Jamieson, R., Spooner, I., Walker, T., Gan, C., Bossy, K., Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjce-2019-0269

2019. Examples of large-scale rock slope deformation from the Tablelands and Lookout Hills of Western Newfoundland, Canada. I. Spooner, *D. Dunnington, J. Gosse, G. Osborn, A. R. Berger and I. Brookes. In Geomorphological Landscapes of Eastern Canada. Ed. Catto, N., and Slaymaker, O. Springer-Verlag.

2018. Water chemistry of managed waterfowl wetlands in coastal Bay of Fundy, Canada: Regional comparisons and temporal trends. *A. L. Loder, I. S. Spooner, N. R. McLellan, J. Kurek, A. Hanson, M. L. Mallory. Wetlands Ecology and Management. DOI: 10.1007/s13157-018-1101-y2018.

2018. Anthropogenic activity in the Halifax region, Nova Scotia, as recorded by bulk geochemistry of lake sediments. Dunnington D., Spooner I.S., Krkošek W.H., Gagnon G.A., Cornett R.J., Kurek J., White C.E., Misiuk B., Tymstra D. (2018). Lake and Reservoir Management 34(4): 334-348. Nominated for the Jim LaBounty best paper award (2019 North American Lake Management Society Annual Meeting).

2018. Using a linked table-based structure to encode self-describing multiparameter spatiotemporal data. *D. Dunnington and I. Spooner. FACETS- doi:10.1139/facets-2017-0026

2018. Nutrient availability reduced in older rural impoundments in coastal Bay of Fundy, Canada. *A. L. Loder; M. L. Mallory; I. S. Spooner; *M. Turner; N. R. McLellan. Hydrobiologia. HYDR-D-17-00118.


Coordinator: Environmental Science Program
Coordinator:
M.Sc. in Applied Geomatics
Manager:
The Morton Centre

Office Location: HSH 325
Phone (902) 585-1312
Email: ian.spooner@acadiau.ca