Keeping scientific research alive: Winnipeg institute breathes new life into outdoor research station.

AuthorRoss, Ian
PositionDryden/Kenora

For most of its 47-year existence, the public perception of the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), southeast of Kenora, took on an almost Area 51 aura.

"People have known about ELA, but that's about it," said Matt McCandless, executive director of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (USD), a Winnipeg policy think tank now operating the 27,000-hectare former federal research station. "They don't know what happens about ELA or haven't been able to see it. That's something we set out to change."

The shroud of secrecy is off. Public outreach and transparency is in.

And unlike their colleagues at the Fisheries and Oceans Canada, no gag orders apply to ELA researchers who are free showcase their work through educational programs and field tours, can engage with area First Nations, and can solicit ideas from outside scientists to keep the project pipeline going.

"We're really making an effort to open up ELA to the community who want to know what's going on and want to understand the research better," said McCandless. "The value to this research is people knowing about it, and to make informed decisions."

Experimental Lakes is an enormous petri dish of 58 small and deep lakes where entire ecosystems can be manipulated to answer the larger scientific questions of climate change, water contamination and agricultural runoff.

The facility is a child of the environmental movement in the 1960s.

The declining heath of the Great Lakes -specifically manmade impacts on Lake Erie - led the Canadian and American governments to select a remote site in northwestern Ontario in 1968. There, research could be done on entire lakes, specifically the impacts of eutrophication in aquatic environments, which are algae blooms caused by increased nitrogen, phosphate and potassium.

It still remains a cornerstone project at ELA.

The seminal acid rain studies performed there in the 1970s led to a Canada-U.S. treaty that curtailed airborne emissions.

The historic tug of war with its bureaucratic masters ultimately led to Ottawa pulling the plug on the ELA's annual $2 million subsidy in 2012. The feds decided that research dollars are better spent on applied research with commercial outcomes rather pure science-driven work.

The threat that a unique facility could be closed down and decades of research scuttled spurred a lobby campaign that attracted international attention and led the USD, a policy think tank 300 kilometres away in Winnipeg, to step in to...

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