Environmental research activities at NUI Galway are to be co-ordinated and the numbers involved in research doubled under an investment programme funded by the Government's Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions. Its £6.7m budget will provide a purpose-built, on-campus research facility and bring in 70 new postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers to staff it.
The new centre will be called the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) and will be located next to the Information Technology Centre, the Science Faculty and the Biomedical Engineering Science Institute, stated Prof Tom Boylan, the university's dean of science.
It will bring together and streamline the work of more than 50 existing NUI Galway researchers in five research centres and 26 separate departments, he said. "The informing principle was to integrate existing capacities, research groups and centres. Parallel with that was the development of the field-research stations," Prof Boylan said. These include the Mace Head Atmospheric Research Station at Carna, Co Galway, and the Carron and Finisvarra research stations, both located in old converted national school buildings on the edge of the Burren.
Key partners in this undertaking will be Atlantic University Alliance members UCC and its Environmental Research Institute and the University of Limerick's Centre for Environmental Research. There are also environmental research teams from UCD and Athlone Institute of Technology, he said.
The idea for the ECI arose because of high-quality environmental research already underway at the university, Prof Boylan said. "The ECI is to be a research facility totally."
It will link the work of some of its leading researchers and scientific centres, he said. Each will now connect to provide synergy between the individual units and allow ideas and data to flow between them.
Included are the Martin Ryan Marine Research Institute, under Prof Michael Guiry; Prof Emer Colleran's environmental research centre; Mace Head, which is under Prof Gerry Jennings in physics; a waste research group, under Dr John Simnie in the Department of Chemistry; the environmental systems modelling group, under Prof Conn Cunnane; the university's department of health promotion, under Prof Cecily Kellegher; and a research group looking at the social and economic impacts of climate change, under Prof Michael Cuddy.
There will be fresh investment for the three field-research centres, he said, but the university was close to a wide variety of ecosystems that could be used as outdoor labs to study climate change and how it alters existing biodiversity in these ecosystems.
The researchers will be able to assess marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems and habitats, such as raised and blanket peat bogs, saltmarshes, turloughs, a karst limestone area in the Burren, systems of small and large lakes and both clean rivers and unpolluted coastline.
The impact of humans on these ecosystems will also be open to study. The region was currently undergoing radical change outside the climate, including population growth, he said. These impacts could also be assessed.
The ability to create a strongly multidisciplinary framework was a central part of the approach taken with the ECI, Prof Boylan said. It would blend the basic science and measurement of climate change with the societal and biological impacts.
The new institute would measure change but also attempt to predict how this will affect life in Ireland and the environment generally. It will also be able to provide solutions to problems, for example waste handling or coastal erosion.