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.
“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.”
