NOAA staff cuts could threaten monitoring of Great Lakes toxic algae
Deep staff reductions and potential funding cuts to NOAA's primary science center on the Great Lakes could increase the risk of human exposure to toxic algae, a perennial threat in the world's largest freshwater ecosystem, officials say.
Since February, NOAA has lost 16 staffers at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Those employees — who were either fired probationary workers or longtime staffers who took retirement — included key members of a team responsible for collecting, analyzing and communicating risks from 'harmful algal blooms,' or HABs.
That's more than a third of the 48-employee lab best known by its acronym, GLERL.
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'This is a critical time,' said Gregory Dick, director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, or CIGLR, a formal partnership between NOAA and 15 academic institutions and private-sector partners that is housed within GLERL. 'I would definitely say our HABs monitoring program is very much in jeopardy for this summer.'
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