A plankton research gem: the probable closure of the Experimental Lakes Area, Canada

It will be of widespread concern to the plankton research community that the Canadian government has decided to close the pioneering Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) currently operated by the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The decision has serious implications for the employment of several of Canada's leading freshwater scientists as well as threatening the termination of a number of important on-going experiments. This closure represents a loss not just for the Canadian scientific community but for the international one as well. One of the most critical implications will be the end of data collection for a long-term time series on phytoplankton and zooplankton communities, including important environmental (chemistry, hydrology) variables: an invaluable data set with fortnightly to monthly data from 40 lakes spanning 44 years (15 lakes have time series longer than 20 years). Such data are rare and are the type necessary for synthetic analyses of communities and ecosystems (e.g. Dodson et al., 2000; Jeziorski et al., 2008; Fox et al., 2010; Helmus et al., 2010; Shurin et al., 2010 which all use ELA data) that are increasingly providing insight into the impacts of anthropogenic changes; changes which often require many years to be properly observed and understood. With the closure of the ELA, the Canadian government has stated that they expect such data collection and archiving to be carried out by Universities. However, this action will in fact result in data collection ceasing because university researchers in Canada do not have access to funding that allows the collection of long-term data. Canada does not have any sort of Long-Term Ecological Research network or funding source. In fact, ELA is the closest thing to LTER we had for lake ecosystems. Federal grants to researchers are explicitly not given for monitoring work. By closing ELA and making no other changes to the funding structure, the government of Canada is ensuring that much of the long-term data collection on lakes will largely disappear. It is to be hoped that support from the international scientific community might result in the closure decision being reversed. Although efforts are still underway to reverse this decision, I fear that this editorial will instead serve as an epitaph to a site of world-renowned plankton research in the country that contains the largest proportion of freshwater resources in the world. In either case, I feel that an acknowledgment of, and retrospective on the important research that has emerged from ELA is warranted. While the work done at ELA has consisted of much more than plankton ecology, much of it has informed the study of plankton in lakes and will have been used directly or indirectly by many in the Journal of Plankton Research community. There have been many contributions from this research site, its scientists and its data to freshwater plankton ecology. The full reference list contains more than 200 plankton-focused publications emerging directly from ELA collected data. While many of these articles have appeared with suitable geographical focus in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences or Limnology and Oceanography, some have also been important contributions to JPR (Healey, 1983; Fee et al., 1987; Sterner, 1998; Davies et al., 2003; Paterson et al., 2011). First authors on many of the plankton papers emerging from ELA include international researchers as well as Canadians, including most notably several groups from the USA and Japan. One of the best features of the ELA, a research site consisting of 58 small lakes, is the fact that many of the lakes can be experimentally manipulated within a protected watershed (Schindler, 1990). The (literally) textbook example of the type of knowledge that can be gained from such experiments is, of course, the phosphorus-eutrophication link that was established by a manipulation in Lake 227 (Schindler, 1974). However, other on-going studies, including the effects of air pollutants on food webs, as well as the role and fate of various toxic substances (e.g. nanosilver, mercury, cadmium, endocrine disruptors, brominated flame retardants) will yield critical insights if funding can be found to permit them to continue. Research at ELA has always been highly relevant, often tackling applied problems to gain fundamental scientific knowledge and vice versa. Key themes in ELA research addressing plankton, in particular, have included climate change responses and indicators (e.g. Schindler et al., 1990; Findlay et al., 2001; Christensen et al., 2006), aquaculture impacts (e.g. Bristow et al., 2008; Findlay et al., 2009; Paterson et al., 2011), biodiversity and food web studies (e.g. Vanni, 1988; Elser et al., 2000; Grover and Chrzanowski, 2000; Paterson et al., 2002; Rusak et al., 2002; Findlay et al., 2005; Vinebrooke et al., 2009), mechanisms of cyanobacteria blooms (e.g. Findlay et al., 1994; Klemer et al., 1995; Mackay and Elser, 1998; Levine and Schindler, 1999; Schindler et al., 2008; Molot et al., 2010), effects of lake acidification (e.g. Nero and Schindler, 1983; Schindler, 1988; Findlay and Kasian, 1991; Hann et al., 1994; Graham et al., 2007) and UV radiation (e.g. Xenopoulos et al., 2002, Tank et al., 2005), nutrient cycling, stoichiometry and ecosystem processes (e.g. Healey and Hendzel, 1980; Guildford et al., 1994; Sterner et al., 1997; Elser et al., 2001; Urabe et al., 2002; Davies et al., 2003) as well as the effects of various contaminants (e.g. Findlay et al., 1996; Paterson et al., 1998; Hall et al., 2009) as mentioned previously. Detailed observations and understanding regarding the ecology of various plankton groups have also resulted from ELA studies (e.g. Fee, 1976; Nero and Davies, 1982; Wehr et al., 1987; Kling and Haakansson, 1988; Patalas and Salki, 1993; Kling et al., 1994; Sterner, 1998; Gontcharov et al., 2002; Makino et al., 2002; Yoshida et al., 2003; Graham and Vinebrooke, 2009) as well as the development of paleolimnological approaches (e.g. Findlay and Shearer, 1992; Leavitt and Findlay, 1994; Leavitt et al., 1999; Cottingham et al., 2000; Moos et al., 2005). This is just a brief survey of some of the major themes and publications. It is obvious that the ELA has been a bountiful generator of scientific data and knowledge over its four plus decades of operation contributing to many of the important current topics in freshwater research. As stated by Jim Elser and quoted in Nature (Hoag, 2012), for the freshwater research community in Canada and much of the world it truly is “… like shutting down Los Alamos or taking the world's best telescope and turning it off”. Unless it is reversed, the decision by the Canadian government will end one of the best long-term and ecosystem-scale data gathering program for in situ freshwater plankton ecology both within in North America and probably globally. The ELA has been extremely influential in international science and collaboration as reflected by the selection of publications cited in this editorial. Widespread concern about the closure continues to intensify within the scientific community and while it remains unclear what will be required to reverse the decision it is to be hoped that this editorial will not be an epitaph.