Lake Monitoring
The Rice Creek Watershed District and its partner organizations maintain several monitoring programs on our lakes to track and protect their water quality. These monitoring programs track different indicators of water quality and help to indicate the general health of a lake. Because we have so many lakes in this region, it is especially important to monitor our lakes so they can continue to provide habitat for wildlife and recreational opportunities for the members of the community.
The staff of the Rice Creek Watershed District visit a selection of lakes every year and actively measure several elements of water quality including: phosphorus, nitrogen, chlorophyll, and Secchi Disk transparency. Vertical depth profiles for each lake are also created, including temperature, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and pH. The above parameters are all important factors in the overall health of the lake and allow the lake managers to diagnose and mitigate potential problems in a lakes water quality, providing information for the management plans of each lake.
In addition to the direct work done by the staff of the RCWD, volunteers monitor many of our lakes through the Metropolitan Council’s CAMP (Citizen Assisted lake Monitoring Program) program. In this program volunteers collect water samples approximately twice monthly, which are analyzed for phosphorus, nitrogen, and chlorophyll. In addition the volunteers note the water temperature, Secchi Disk depth, and make general observations about the lake. The Met Council releases a lake water quality report once a year.
Several other organizations collect water samples from our lakes and share their data with the RCWD such as Ramsey County. The Ramsey County Environmental Services Division monitors several lakes in the RCWD for nutrient and chemical composition. This sort of data-sharing is important because it means that more lakes get monitored in a given year and reduces duplication. By working cooperatively, more information is collected in any given year, allowing the district to focus on management plans and more specialized research projects.