Trends in Water Transparency for Midwest Lakes
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Grace Hong
From National Science Foundation Discoveries:
“Scientists engaged in a study of long-term water quality trends in Midwestern lakes found some good news: little change in water clarity in more than 3,000 lakes. Look deeper, and the research becomes something more: a chronicle of a new source of data for scientists, data from residents of towns and villages surrounding the lakes.
The results are published this week in a paper in the journal PLOS ONE. The paper co-authors analyzed almost a quarter of a million observations taken over seven decades on 3,251 lakes in eight Midwestern states.”
Adam Hinterthuer, writing for University of Wisconsin - Madison:
“What the authors found was that, on an individual scale, some lakes were getting clearer while others were not. However, says Lottig, combining all that data together indicates that there is a slightly increasing trend in water clarity at a regional scale. “Unfortunately,” he says, “the data don’t exist to explain those patterns.” Lottig hopes efforts like the “Cross-Scale Interaction” or “CSI Limnology” project, an international team of scientists that he’s a part of, can collect global data on things like water chemistry and aquatic biology that will add context to the data generated by citizens.
Though the citizen scientist dataset limited his team’s ability to explain the patterns they observed, Lottig says it suggests that such information can play a role in shaping future research — a possibility that has some scientific organizations taking notice.”
Remember, science's strength flows from the sample size. But beware. Controls, randomization, replication, and statistical inference. The light side are they. Once you start down this path, forever will it dominate your destiny.
