Canada’s first-ever Great Lakes and Carolinian forest research centre

For now, it's an area of overgrown fields and scrub forest near Leamington.

 

Within the next few years, it will be home to the University of Windsor’s first field research station, to be built near the southernmost point in Canada as the nation’s only centre focusing on the Great Lakes and Carolinian forest ecosystem.

 

Researchers working at Canada’s only centre devoted to studying the Great Lakes and Carolinian forest eco-system will have a critical role in monitoring and measuring biodiversity and climate change and in helping produce environmental and economic solutions in the essential fisheries, shipping and agriculture industries.

 

UWindsor biology professor Dan Mennill, who co-chairs the planning committee for the new centre with Daniel Heath of the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER), says the University has some of the country’s most outstanding environmental researchers. The centre will help establish their reputations on a national and international scale.

 

“The project grew out of the realization that Windsor’s researchers were all conducting their world-class research programs in far-flung places,” says Dr. Mennill. The centre will consolidate the work of researchers at GLIER, the departments of biological and earth and environmental sciences and from other departments across campus to “build excellence.”

 

Organizers say the centre will follow the example of GLIER. Its pioneering work on the zebra mussel in 1986 led to studies into other invasive species, raised millions in research funding, and led to the establishment of the Canadian Aquatic Invasive Species Network, which brings together researchers from 15 universities across Canada.

 

The centre has already attracted attention from such groups and individuals as the Essex Region Conservation Authority and Phil Roberts of Holiday Beach Conservation Migration Observatory, and Point Pelee National Park. Mennill says the new centre will be multi-tiered, offering research, teaching, training and outreach opportunities to the community, generating interest in scientific research at area schools and among the general public.

 

The Town of Leamington agreed to donate the site of approximately nine hectares in September 2007. The transfer was finalized in the summer of 2010. Under the agreement, the town will keep its oil and gas rights on the land and the University is responsible for all costs associated with the ownership transfer.

 

The planning committee intends to develop a satellite model for the research station, where the Leamington site will provide a base station from which to explore the biology of other aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in southwestern Ontario.