Scientists are looking at new ways to monitor the health of our local waterways, and they want the public’s help to do so.
As part of the 2024 Ag Day event held this past Saturday, April 6, 2024, in Chapple, Teika Newton, the international watershed coordinator with the Lake of the Woods Water Sustainability Foundation, was invited to speak on the Lake of the Woods and Rainy River watersheds and efforts being undertaken to monitor the health of the systems and set new benchmarks for potential problem chemicals. As part of her work alongside the International Joint Commission (IJC), Newton explained that a project she is currently working on would help to keep an eye on the waters of Rainy River and help to monitor potential issues in order to prevent complications in the river and in downstream watersheds like Like of the Woods and further into Manitoba.
“I am working on a project right now through the International Joint Commission to look at setting basically monitoring and reporting standards for water quality for this shared transboundary,” Newton said.
“It’s building on work that started a number of years ago, we’re into a second phase of this study where we’re actually trying to put some hard numbers on different nutrients, contaminants and ecological indicators that we’re concerned about.”
Newton noted that the Lake of the Woods Watershed Foundation is an organization that helps to set directives on water quality, where each directive sets an international standard around water quality in a given area, along with alert levels for different items of concern, like the aforementioned nutrient, contaminant or chemical levels. Newton noted that Rainy River has had water quality objectives set since the 1960s when they measured the levels of chemicals that the area doesn’t see much of anymore.
“In our area, we have had water quality objectives only for Rainy River and they have existed since the 1960s,” she explained.
“They covered a bunch of things… that were related to effluent from pulp mills. So it was things like wood sugars and different chemical contaminants, but those things are not really very rare. Winter anymore. The pulp mills are, by and large, gone. And effluent treatment processes have changed a lot in recent decades. So we don’t have the same concerns on Rainy River that we historically had. What we’re dealing with is instead a legacy of the pollutants that came from those mills, loaded into the river and flowed downstream into Lake of the Woods, and we’re slowly flushing those out but still dealing with the long-term impacts of those.”
Indeed, while the mill might be gone and many of the chemicals that it once sent into the river of much less concern, Newton noted that one of the chemicals that has caused notable issues downstream of the Rainy River has been phosphorus. Phosphorus in Lake of the Woods has historically come from effluent from the mills, along with historic improper sewage management, but the impact is that higher levels of phosphorus in lakes can lead to algal blooms, an occurrence that sees algae in a given water body explode in population, which can in turn produce toxic chemicals and low oxygen within that body of water.
Part of the project Newton is working on is to help set standards of how much of any given substance, including but not limited to phosphorus, should be found in Rainy River, and where a threshold should be that would then trigger an alert for that problematic substance, allowing governments to react.
“There really aren’t that many things that we’re terribly concerned about beyond phosphorus, nitrogen and some of the things that you would want to monitor long term,” she said.
“Like, are there trends in chlorophyll, in algae production, in pH, temperature, that sort of thing? Do we see that there are changes in ice profile or anything like that, but not necessarily setting an alert for it. The benefit of an alert is that if you exceed that threshold, then governments find out about it and can do something about it… As I mentioned, the only water quality objective that we need to set is for phosphorus. So we’re working on doing that right now.”
Newton said they are currently working on whittling down a list of about 400 different chemicals that once needed to be monitored on the Rainy River down to something more manageable, particularly as many of those previously monitored chemicals are simply no longer present in significant levels in the river.
Newton then noted that, because another source of phosphorus in rivers can be tied to rainfall events that wash nutrients, along with topical applications of fertilizer or pesticides, into the water system, she and the organization were looking to meet and speak with area agricultural producers to help get a better understanding of how they work and that any measures put in place would be in the best possible interest of all parties along the river. The new plan would also potentially include setting best practices for managing contributions to soil erosion in the area, one example of which was given as the runoff from tile drainage systems. The plan could examine different treatments of those endpoints, exploring new ditch systems or other materials to better prevent erosion and runoff.
“The goal with the watershed board is more to engage local people in helping to make sure that we’re having the best possible outcomes for everyone,” Newton said.
“It’s not at all policing, because there’s no there’s no function that nobody has any authority to tell anyone what to do, basically. So it’s really kind of finding out the science of what is driving algae blooms in Lake of the Woods. Where’s that coming from? And what can we do about it? For the most part, Rainy River falls below the water quality standards for any of the government agencies that are studying it, but there are moments throughout the season when it will spike. And it isn’t necessarily related to agriculture, it’s related to like massive rainfall events that wash a bunch of nutrients into the lake. And when I’m talking about nutrients, I’m not talking about just fertilizer, I’m talking about like, soil cover and things that are naturally in the environment.”
“What we’re actually trying to do through the Lake of the Woods water sustainability foundation right now, we just applied for some government of Canada funding that hopefully we will receive at some point soon, that would enable us to do three years of basically listening to community members and working with you to try to build a management plan to ensure that we have good water quality in Rainy River and going into Lake of the Woods,” Newton continued.
“So it’s exactly this kind of getting together and talking about what are the things that you will see that are potential problems that are potential sources of nutrient loading. You’re all farmers, we know that there are agricultural activities that could be producing nutrient runoff, but there are lots of other things and you live here in this basin. I live in Kenora, so I can’t tell you what’s happening in your backyard, but I can come and listen to you and learn what’s going on here. And we can try to work together to figure out how we do our practices in the best way possible to not have contamination going into our waterways.”
For more information about the Lake of the Woods Water Sustainability Foundation, visit their website at lowwsf.com.
