Yes, acidification and aluminum are connected. However, we do need further research on the aluminum aspect of things to determine what exactly the causes are. We know that is being leached out of the clay in some of those rivers, specifically in the inner Bay of Fundy. The mitigation that we performed with liming on the West River is actually only.... We've seen such great success there by only liming about 8% of that river on a branch where the population is not as densely concentrated.
In the past there have been projects in the province that have done gravel liming, but without the sustained liming in that method it hasn't actually produced the same amount of results that we've been able to produce with the doser. For something like a salmon run on the West River it would be estimated that you would be looking at about 50 years of liming until you got a full restoration there. That has to do with the five-year life cycle of the salmon. What we have seen there is that with the trout fishery they have a much quicker return from sea. We've been able to build that fishery up there. The study that was done identified about 13 rivers on the southern upland. The West River was one of those. What we would like to do in the future is take this model for liming and we're proposing a second doser in the coming years up on the Killag portion where there is actually a larger concentration of fish to demonstrate that this could be a viable model in Nova Scotia to mitigate the acidification effects that we've seen.