North American Lake Management Society: Best Paper Award Nominated Papers Available

NALMS:

“The papers nominated for the Jim LaBounty Best Paper Award in 2019 will be available for free from January 11, 2020 through the end of February. Normally papers published in the last 3 years are only available by subscription, but as a tribute to the quality of research and importance to the lake management community, these papers are being made freely available for a limited time. The 2019 award went to Radomski and Carlson, but all these these papers are worth a read.”

It is a great honor to receive this award. It was exciting to be nominated, and we are delighted to have been chosen for the best paper award! The Lake and Reservoir Management journal is a high quality outlet for lake management science, and we’ve come to appreciate your hard work and the dedication of the Editorial Board.

The award-winning article summarized our research on predicting lake water quality and an economic analysis of a set of actions to improve and protect lake water quality. Our results were not intuitive. For Minnesota lakes, we concluded that to best meet the Clean Water Act’s goals of restoring degraded waters and protecting waters (i.e., the anti-degradation clause) that Minnesota should invest a greater share of funds for lake protection, less on those already impaired. The primary focus on impaired lakes results in considerable forgone benefit (~80%) and substantially higher costs. We predicted a 6X greater return on investment by protecting high quality lakes than focusing on impaired lakes. Currently, only about 20% of the Minnesota’s Clean Water Fund competitive grants go toward protecting unimpaired high quality lakes at risk. We suggest that policy makers reevaluate the distribution of those funds and that they consider investing a greater percentage to protect lakes at risk before they become impaired.

John Meyers: Lake Volunteers Needed→

Duluth Tribune:

“The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is looking for volunteers, nearly 700 of them, to measure water quality across many of the state’s lakes and rivers.

The PCA, which is tasked with both monitoring and protecting the state’s 12,000 lakes and 92,000 miles of streams, this year is asking for volunteers to monitor 676 high priority sites on rivers and lakes, including many in the Northland. Data gathered by volunteers is reported back to the agency and used to track the health of waterways.”

Minnehaha Watershed District: Zebra Mussels Improve Water Clarity in Lake Minnetonka→

“Zebra mussels have caused significant changes in Lake Minnetonka’s water quality, according to findings of a study by Minnehaha Creek Watershed District (MCWD). The District has been monitoring the lake’s zebra mussel population since they were first detected there in 2010. Five years into the study, which was developed in partnership with Blue Water Science, MCWD released its findings on Thursdsay, April 21 at its AIS Spotlight, a gathering of community leaders at Minnetonka Community Center.

The District has discovered the biggest water quality changes are occurring among bays with the highest number of zebra mussels. In Wayzata Bay, which the population topped out at an estimated 200,000 zebra mussels per square meter in 2014, there has been an increase in water clarity and a decrease in algae (Chlorophyll) and Phosphorus. Those changes are not as prevalent in bays with lower zebra mussel populations. In Halsted Bay, which has 28 zebra mussels per square meter, there has been little change in water clarity, Chlorophyll and Phosphorus.”

One suspects that some bays with improved water clarity may see an increase in aquatic plant habitat.

NASA: Less Algae, Not Clear Water, Keeps A Lake Blue→

“Lake Tahoe’s iconic blueness is more strongly related to the lake’s algal concentration than to its clarity, according to research in “Tahoe: State of the Lake Report 2015,” released today by the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) of the University of California, Davis. The lower the algal concentration, the bluer the lake.

Data from a research buoy in the lake, owned and operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, enabled Shohei Watanabe, a postdoctoral researcher at TERC, to create a Blueness Index that quantified Lake Tahoe’s color for the first time.

The assumption that lake clarity is tied to blueness has driven advocacy and management efforts in the Lake Tahoe Basin for decades. But Watanabe’s research showed that at times of the year when the lake’s clarity increases, its blueness decreases, and vice versa.

Watanabe combined the blueness measurements with data on clarity. Clarity is measured by observing the depth at which a dinner-plate-sized white disk remains visible when lowered into the water. He was surprised to find that blueness and clarity did not correspond. In fact, they varied in opposite directions.

This is due to seasonal interplay among sediment, algae and nutrients in the lake. Clarity is controlled by sediment. Blueness is controlled by algal concentration, which in turn is controlled by the level of nutrients available to the algae.”

People Post Pictures of Clear-Water Lakes More Than Turbid Lakes→

Roberta Kwok, writing for Conservation Magazine:

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“People were more likely to visit bigger lakes with clearer water, the researchers report in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. For every additional meter of water clarity, visitors drove nearly an hour longer to get to and from the lake, spending about $22 more in travel costs. Lakes with boat ramps also were more popular.

The study authors estimate that improving a lake’s clarity by one meter would bump up the average number of visits by 1,389 per year. The overall number of lake visits in a region might not increase, since the number of people travelling to the murkier lakes could drop. But if people opted to visit a lake rather than, say, a pool, the total number of visits could rise.”

Recreational demand for clean water: evidence from geotagged photographs by visitors to lakes By Bonnie L Keeler, Spencer A Wood, Stephen Polasky, Catherine Kling, Christopher T Filstrup, and John A Downing