Research will help assess spill cleanups

Re: Vancouver fuel spill underscores gap in research after federal cuts: aquarium, April 17

The article did not quite capture the Vancouver Aquarium’s view on the recent oil spill in English Bay.

We live in a province with a very long coastline. If B.C. were a country it would have the eighth longest coastline in the world (37,000 kilometres or so), after Norway and ahead of the Philippines.

There never has been enough government money to monitor the marine environment, and there never will be.

That’s not the point. In any given year, a couple of hundred scientists and researchers are out on the coast conducting research.

The information they gather — data collected by scientists from universities, government agencies, private engineering and environmental firms, and non-governmental organizations — has never before been aggregated into a complete picture of how the marine ecosystems are doing.

Last year, the Vancouver Aquarium established the Coastal Ocean Research Institute (CORI) to do just that: to foster collaboration as an innovative way to get a clearer picture.

We’re already working with scientists from universities and government agencies up and down the coast in this process. In aggregating existing data on our marine environment, we can see some holes or gaps.

It’s also clear we need systematic monitoring in some areas, so when an event such as the recent oil spill occurs we’ll know how things were before the incident, can assess the potential damage and have a benchmark for a cleanup target.

We need more systematic, continuous monitoring over the long term to see trends, understand cause-and-effect changes, assess risk, and reliably set cleanup targets. DR. JOHN NIGHTINGALE Vancouver Aquarium DEANA LANCASTER Communications adviser, Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre