Canadian Gov Begins Shuttering Ontario Lakes Research Station; Scientists Barred From Entry 1 April
The Canadian government has barred scientists from entering the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario starting on 1 April and has begun dismantling some of its buildings. As funding for the internationally admired freshwater research station dried up this week, scientists with on-going projects at the facility were left wondering about the future of their research.
“It’s up in the air as to what’s going to happen,” says Chris Metcalfe, an environmental toxicologist at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Metcalfe received a CAN$800,000 federal grant to study the ecological effects of nanosilver. He had been preparing to contaminate an entire lake with the nanosilver particles this summer. Metcalfe says although he’s looking at several options, he is facing the possibility of abandoning the study altogether.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (known by its old acronym DFO) has been looking for a new operator since the government announced the closure of the research station in May 2012. But after meetings with a handful of university representatives proved fruitless, the government began courting the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), a United Nations think-tank headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to take over the facility.
IISD has kept its protracted negotiations with the government under tight wraps, but the institute’s new CEO has offered a sliver of hope that IISD might save the ELA from being mothballed. In an interview with Postmedia News earlier this week Scott Vaughan, the new head of the IISD, said the institute could maintain current projects at the ELA. Before starting his new job, Vaughan, who had been the federal environment watchdog, had told the CBC that he would take over ELA “absolutely, in a heartbeat.”
EDIT
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/04/canada-shutters-research-lakes-facilities.html
