Environment committee  On the Experimental Lakes, we have had some scientific involvement over the years, but it has been led through Fisheries and Oceans. A lot of the scientific effort has come through that department. A lot of our scientific effort on nutrients in the last 10 years, or probably 20

Environment committee  It's related to that, yes. That's consuming some of the oxygen.

Environment committee  Yes, changes to the oxygen or the extent of the oxygenated zone can affect the fish.

Environment committee  It can. I really can't speak to the details of that, but it affects the zonation of the lake.

Environment committee  We collect sediments routinely for both analysis of contaminants as well as nutrients to look at the oxygen demand of the sediment. One of the concerns is that we've had nutrients coming into these lakes...well, they come in naturally so they've been coming in since geologic time

Environment committee  I was simply going to say that we have two what we call master stations for atmospheric deposition monitoring, and maybe eight or ten others around the edge of the lake and in the watershed. Those are paralleled by similar stations on the U.S. side so that we have good estimates

Environment committee  That's correct. They're experiencing near record lows in Georgian Bay.

Environment committee  What we've seen is that with the water levels going down, the temperatures in the summer and the slight increase in temperatures is driving those warmer waters down deeper into the water column, so to speak. That collapses that narrow cold band on the bottom and makes it more sha

Environment committee  Maybe I'll start by being a little bit technical, but then I'll bring it to a higher level. Basically, as scientists, we look at dissolved and particulate phosphorus. These are technical terms; it depends on what passes through one of our laboratory filters, a very fine filter,

Environment committee  There are still a number of questions about that one. Part of it seems to be changing farm practices. Initially we used farm practices where there was a lot of tillage on the land, and that tillage resulted in the soil particles being loosened. When we had a heavy snowfall and t