In early spring this year Aaron Fisk and his colleagues were preparing for their usual field season, planning to deploy bright yellow autonomous gliders in the Western Basin of Lake Erie. The goal was to study what happens as the lake transitions from winter to summer and how nutrients, temperature and other factors affect algal blooms and water quality.
But then the Trump administration began making major cuts to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that works closely with Canadian scientists on research in the Great Lakes, providing money, ships and equipment for many joint projects. Funding that had already been promised was cancelled or delayed, and long-time scientific collaborators at the agency were suddenly fired.
Although the initial deployment was delayed by late ice, it should have been possible to get out on the water within a week of the planned start date using an icebreaker, says Dr. Fisk, an ecologist at the University of Windsor and science director of the Real-Time Aquatic Ecosystem Observation Network (RAEON). "But then things got so chaotic with NOAA that everything shut down," he says, and the spring glider deployment was cancelled.
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