On Friday, it was announced that researchers at the University of Windsor received nearly $7 million to study ways to improve and preserve the Great Lakes.
The funding, which will primarily be used to purchase new research equipment, comes from organizations such as the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, and the University of Windsor.
The environmental stress and receding water levels of the Great Lakes have received no shortage of attention in recent months, and many people are demanding action.
“To effectively manage them, we must address environmental stressors by assessing, analyzing, and finding ways to remediate the problems they’re facing,” Dan Health, director of the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER), told The Windsor Star.
According to a report by the CBC, the new tools provided by the funding will allow the researchers to understand the contaminants from sources such as sewage and agricultural waste; give them the technology to assess responses to disturbances in the ecosystem from climate change, pollution, and invasive species; and it will provide the researchers with a broader knowledge of the interactions among organisms, which is essential for understanding the lakes’ ecosystems and overall health.
“The point of this is not just to do research that’s going to get published in journals,” Heath said. Instead, the researchers want to confirm what’s going on, predict how things are going to change in the future, and from there, find out how the situation can be remedied.
