The past two weeks we have been out in our boats and around the lake sampling water, sediment and macrophytes. North Bay has been a point of interest to us, because it is the location of an influx of milfoil (an invasive species) and the inflow from North Pond. We are testing the water at the base and the head of these inflows coming into Great Pond from surrounding lakes in the watershed (Salmon Lake, North Pond). As of right now we are simply collecting all of our samples and using exciting equipment to do so. We have a Dissolved Oxygen Reader, a GPS, two different types of sediment corers and other cool tools. But even with all this technology we still had to have a hard core member of our environmental assessment team hop into the water to collect shallow sediment samples.

Another aspect of our research we decided to incorporate was an assessment of LakeSmart properties in comparison with non-LakeSmart properties. Our hope is to provide the public with a correlation between LakeSmart properties and lower P and N levels, which is the goal of the program. With some evidence pointing in that direction we hope to encourage more lake residents to turn their homes into LakeSmart properties. More on this later.

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Molly Susla