For Great Lakes researchers it’s the best of times and the worst of times… With record high water levels, this year is critical for researchers, unfortunately coronavirus is limiting what research can be done.
Director of Central Michigan University’s Institute for Great Lakes Research, Don Uzarski said his federally funded research is being severely limited during a critical time for data collection.
“We’re coming off of 15 years of low water, and now going on 6 years of high water, and we’re reaching record highs, you know we can’t go back in time and collect data and learn from how that ecosystem is essentially handling the abnormal fluctuations in water levels.”
Uzarski relies on researchers from eleven universities, four government agencies, and one private entity. He said the current crisis is interrupting data collection and important personnel training.
“We employ about a 150 individuals basin wide from all of these entities, and a good number of those are graduate students and undergraduate students, some of them are going to graduate and we start losing critical people, but at the same time many of those were training new students and we’re losing that component right now.”
Uzarski said his team is only able to collect about half as many samples as they typically would. And he says, coronavirus shutdowns are impacting how many samples can be processed once they’re collected.
He said the coronavirus-related slow down is interfering with of his projects which aims to better prepare the great lakes region for the possibility of an oil spill.
“We’re not really prepared because we don’t have the tools that marine scientists have to combat a spill in freshwater so we’re trying to develop the techniques and tools.”
Uzarski said it’s difficult to collect samples, conduct lab tests, and get data in this time. He says the team is doing what they can, but for the most part, they’re at a standstill.
