Thank you very much for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to describe the Biotron, a facility funded through CFI.
The Biotron is an interdisciplinary international experimental climate change research facility located on the campus of the University of Western Ontario and dedicated to the elucidation of the impact of climate change and extreme environments on plants, insects, and micro-organisms.
Experimental climate change research represents an important new experimental approach whereby researchers can quantify the ability or inability of organisms to adapt to new environments. Thus, this research approach not only provides important insights into the impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem health, but also identifies possible ways to maintain food and energy supplies under future suboptimal climate conditions.
The principal collaborating institutions for this initiative include the University of Western Ontario, the University of Guelph, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
The three primary missions of the research programs enabled by the facility are, first, to accelerate understanding of the responses to and consequences of global climate change on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems; second, to provide the research infrastructure to support and stimulate the shift of growth markets towards so-called bioeconomy in the areas of medicine, agriculture, and forestry; and finally, the Biotron provides the expertise and analytical facilities to assess and quantify the potential environmental benefits and risks associated with emergent biotechnologies on biodiversity and general ecosystem health.
This facility allows world-leading scientists not only to elucidate mechanisms by which organisms as diverse as plants, algae, cyanobacteria, soil micro-organisms, and insects sense and respond to environmental change at the community, whole organism, and molecular levels, but also to assess the impact of climate change on the interactions of these organisms within controlled ecosystems.
The Biotron was funded in March 2004. CFI contributed 40%, Ontario Innovation Trust contributed another 40%, and the University of Western Ontario and industry contributed 20%. Construction of the Biotron was completed in the summer of 2007, and the grand opening is planned for September 2008.
Since the year 2000, funding for basic and scientific research in Canada has exhibited unprecedented growth through the Canada Foundation for Innovation as well as through programs such as the Canada research chairs program. The visions represented by these innovative programs have received international recognition by the scientific community and represent a major attractor for hiring new faculty at universities as well as in attracting post-doctoral fellows and graduate students who are HQP.
However, the long-term sustainability of the new infrastructure created through CFI remains a major challenge for the future. The potential demise of support for these infrastructure facilities created through CFI will be inevitable without continued long-term public support combined with industrial support for basic research in large facilities such as the Biotron, so it's critical for the life of facilities such as this that we find a balance between targeted research funds and discovery-based research.
Thank you very much.