Project Description. The pELAstic Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration of scientists and students from across Canada and the US who have been investigating the fate and effects of microplastics in freshwater ecosystems. Since 2019, our team has conducted large-scale limnocorral and whole-lake manipulation experiments in boreal lakes at the IISD-Experimental Lakes Area, Ontario. To date, our team has published 15 scientific papers, appeared in national and international media, and trained over 40 students. In the next phase, funded by the NSERC-ECCC Plastics Science and Innovation for a Cleaner and More Sustainable Future initiative, we examine how freshwater ecosystems recover from plastic pollution, both naturally and through remediation strategies. We are recruiting for two positions:
Position 1 - Amphibian Ecotoxicology: assesses whether legacy microplastics remain a risk to health of American toads through sampling natural population of toads in boreal lakes and in situ experiments.
Position 2 - Sediment Remediation: examines factors controlling degradation of microplastics in boreal lake sediments and tests the efficacy of novel remediation techniques through field-based experiments.
Online Resources.
QE3 Research Group: https://qe3research.ca/
pELAstic Project: https://thepelasticproject.com/
IISD-Experimental Lakes Area: https://www.iisd.org/ela/
Department of Biology, Queen's University: https://biology.queensu.ca/
