– sadly Mari Foroutan one of the graduate students who has been working on her Phd for almost three years here at Sunfish Lake was killed earlier this week in the crash of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 in Tehran. Mari and the team working with her (Marie, Kevin, Dr. Claude Duguay) have the ice camera’s currently set-up on three docks, the three bluetooth buoys out on the lake measuring thermal currents, and did much of the drone mapping of the lake for bathemetric data including producing the brochure below that they presented at our June Sunfish Lake Association Annual General Meeting.
Mari has been out to Sunfish Lake weekly and sometimes daily for the past two years collecting data and had become a pretty good expert on our Lake as well as the surrounding ecosystem. Many folks may have helped her launch my rowboat or conversed with her and they gathered samples around the lake (though she was usually pretty quiet with her hat pulled down low over her face as she liked to wear it).
You can learn more about Mari towards the end of the Globe & Mail article below and in her University of Waterloo bio:
The University of Waterloo, the Ecology Research Lab, her supervising professor Dr. Duguay, and her research team have all been in touch with me and we will figure out how to continue her research over the months ahead. They have informed us that there is going to be a memorial for her at the UW Environment 1 building tomorrow (Friday Jan 10th) at 3:00pm that we have been invited to attend.
