Peggy Revell
Scientists and researchers from both Canada and the United States are attending the sixth International Lake of the Woods Water Quality Forum taking place today and tomorrow (March 11-12) at Rainy River Community College over in International Falls.
“It’s primarily a technical forum . . . for networking [and an] information exchange amongst the scientists and resource managers,” explained Todd Sellers, executive director of the Lake of the Woods Water Sustainability Foundation.
“But at the end of the day, the information that they’re learning about the lake will help guide the development of the plans and actions of all of our natural resource management agencies around the lake.
“We’re all interested in water quality and good water quality, and healthy and productive fisheries,” Sellers added, noting there also will be presentations about research being done on the Rainy River basin.
With these water basins overlapping jurisdictions between national and provincial governments, forums like this help bring together researchers from all sides, Sellers stressed.
“This forum has really been a key part of bringing all of those government agencies, and the scientists and the resource managers from those agencies, together to both share their information and begin to build sort of collaborative work,” he explained.
“It’s really contributed to developing a critical mass of interest in the lake, as well as it’s sort of kick-started that collaboration I referred to.
“And it’s incredibly important, with all the lakes divided up like a pie amongst at least three jurisdictions, that there be a forum like this to help promote the agencies all work together towards common goals on the lake.
“This year there will be a couple of really, I think, important presentations,” Sellers noted.
One of these will be by Kathryn Hargan of Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., who will be presenting the preliminary results of her work at developing a “nutrient budget” for Lake of the Woods.
“What a nutrient budget does is identify all the sources and amounts of nutrients entering into the lake and totals them up, much like a financial budget, income and expenses, nutrients coming in and nutrients coming out,” Sellers explained.
“And that will be the first step towards developing water quality models for the lake that will tell us how we can improve the lake water quality by addressing sources of nutrients to the lake.”
Sellers said this is a big study the foundation has co-ordinated and put together involving not just Trent University, but also St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, the Ministry of the Environment, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and Manitoba Water Stewardship.
There will be more than a dozen other presentations made by researchers, he added, including ones looking at the effects of the lake level regulations over the years on the ecology of the lake.
Previous years have seen variety of science and resource management topics presented, such as nutrient loading to the lake, algae blooms, as well as “paleolimnology” (a type of “archaeology of the lake sediment” done through looking at coring samples to see some of the historical changes of the lake).
Also being released today at the forum is the 140-page “State of the Basin report for Lake of the Woods and Rainy River Basin.”
“This is a project that’s taken a little over two years to complete,” Sellers noted, adding this report is another example of a collaboration between many agencies as it was assembled by the foundation with the Ministry of the Environment, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and Environment Canada.
“What the State of the Basin Report is, is the first sort of analysis or synthesis of all that’s currently known about the lake. Everything from climate change through to the fish and fisheries, the water quality in the lake, the nutrient status of the lake,” Sellers explained.
“Basically a full work-up of everything that’s known and, importantly, everything that’s not known about the lake.”
The report provides a “base line of information” about what is known, he explained, meaning they can use it to guide future research and “assess any progress towards improving the water quality and ecology of the lake.”
Following its release, the report will be available online at www.lowwsf.com
Another key part of the two-day forum will be a session on special emerging issues, which this year will focus on formalizing international co-ordination.
“Our foundation has been working with our governments around the basin to promote the notion that there should be sort of some formalized agreement for co-operative work on the [Lake of the Woods],” Sellers said.
“And we believe that it should be done through the International Joint Commission that already has the pollution control mandate for the Rainy River and has since 1965.”
Sellers noted that towards the end of January, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty sent a letter to Foreign Affairs minister Lawrence Cannon “basically agreeing” with what the foundation has been asking of the federal government: to expand the Rainy River Pollution Control Board to include Lake of the Woods, and have the IJC establish and co-ordinate a “binational task force on nutrient loading to the lake.”
“So I think the momentum is building for formalized international co-ordination, and I know some of the government agencies in Ontario, Manitoba, [and] Minnesota are already talking together about crafting some sort of agreement together formally,” Sellers said.
“I think that’s great news.”
As the second-largest lake in Ontario outside of the Great Lakes, Sellers stressed Lake of the Woods is important when it comes to economies throughout the area.
“It deserves the same kind of international care and stewardship that we’ve had for the Great Lakes in southern Ontario, and we think momentum is building for that to happen,” he remarked.
