Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information is available at bemidjiairport.org Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Randy Cadwell.

In today's show I tell you the story about some Minnesotans who assist the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency by volunteering to adopt and monitor the water quality of many of our streams and lakes across the state.

We're about to collect a water sample here at Coffee Pot Landing.

For stream monitoring you like to be in the middle of the stream, not along the shore where the water is still, you want to be where the current is and where there's kind of an average of conditions.

I've got a gallon size bucket here with a retractable dog leash which works really well for dropping down into the water.

The volunteer water monitoring program has been around for over 40 years.

We have over 1,100 volunteers all across the state of Minnesota who either measure lake water clarity or stream water clarity.

There are no samples that need to be taken but there are physical parameters that volunteers do look for such as color, physical suitability, recreational suitability, as well as temperature if they have a thermometer.

I'm going to just throw the thermometer in there for a moment because one of the things that we take a look at is the water temperature which will vary over the summer.

That's just about at 70.

Water temperature will increase on streams, possibly even to an unhealthy level if there's not a lot of rain over the summer.

You also can get an increase in water temperature if there's an increase in sedimentation in the river.

That means an overland flow of soil or sediments.

So the soil particles, mineral particles that might end up in the water they heat up and they heat the water column, so water temperature would hint at that before we've even taken a look at the water quality.

I'm also taking a look at is the water low, normal, high, zero.

We don't have zero, I would say it's low compared to usual whereas it was normal last time.

Did I take a photo?

Yes, I'm going to take a photo.

We don't have to do a lot of testing here to get a lot of information.

So basically we're looking at clarity, which is related to sedimentation and also water temperature, and we compare that throughout the summer and then from year to year.

So the last thing that we're going to do is a clarity assessment that has to do with sediments in the water and to do that we're using what's called a secchi tube.

This has a small disc that's much like the standard secchi disc that is used to take a look at sedimentation and clarity and transparency in lakes or even in the ocean.

To do a stream, especially since streams are often much shallower than the middle of lakes, we use a tube that has a mini disc and then on the side the centimeters are calibrated so that we can compare our values from this reading to a reading that somebody might find downstream at Lake Plantagenet or upstream at Lake Itasca for example.

So it's pretty simple we're just going to pour that.

All righty.

So we make sure that the disc is all the way on the bottom and then I'm going to start to slowly pull it up until I start to see that black and white checkered pattern, when I see it again I drop it down again till it disappears.

Pulling it up a little bit, dropping it a little bit, pulling it up a little bit, dropping it a little bit, making sure that I've got the spot where it's really coming clearly into view and that's about it at that point.

So I'm going to take a look, usually this spot is at 1 meter or 100 cm depth of clarity.

You can see that we're only at 96, that's not a dramatic drop in the overall scheme of things, a lot of heavily sedimented streams would be much worse than that.

This particular site has been as low as 39 so 96 is not a dramatic drop but it is reflecting that there was rain yesterday.

So there was some runoff into the river that both cooled off the stream temperature but also put a little bit of sediment into the river.

Okay and then another thing that MPCA wants to know that is a qualitative assessment is what's the recreational suitability of this spot right now.

Well if you were a canoe paddler and stopping at this campsite for the night after a long sweaty day of paddling would you want to swim in this stream.

This is a spot where campers usually would swim, so taking a look in there I don't see slimy algae, I don't see muddy icky water, I don't see litter floating by, I don't see invasive species like zebra muscles with their sharp edges that would cut people's feet.

The recreational suitability is looking good so I give that a number one.

Fortunately they give us waterproof data sheets, so that's for this particular site.

The variability in this site compared to 30 years ago, this site is much healthier as a stream than it used to be because if you look at that tree line back there there was a stand of forest that was cleared in '92 and that's State Forest land and people can get permits to do logging back there but the logging seems to have happened a little too close to the river.

There's a bit of a hill there and a slope and some erosion.

So when I first started sampling here in '93 often times this site was really, well actually as low as 27 sometimes after a rain, there was just tremendous runoff coming down from that hill, goes to show that vegetating a hillside and having a buffer zone along the river is really, really important, and when you remove that vegetation, not just the canopy but the roots that hold the soil in place, when you remove all of that, anytime it rains you're going to get a washing of sediment right into the river, and as I mentioned that has a kind of a cascade effect.

The fish diversity went down at that time, the invertebrate diversity went down, it just made it a harder place for organisms to live and it took several years before that started to improve.

By the late '90s there was at least not tree growth again but enough bushes and shrubs and herbaceous vegetation to kind of slow down that erosion and things started to improve at this location.

This is practically in my backyard.

I care about what goes on in my backyard, I want to have a stake in it and because I have a science background and love the river it follows naturally to want to be out here collecting data that contributes to the bigger picture for the state of Minnesota.

I've lived here on Lake Beltrami just north of Bemidji for about 37 years now and soon after we moved here I decided to initiate lake clarity readings on Lake Beltrami.

I began in 1991 so this will be my 34th year of monitoring the water clarity on this lake.

Well, I try to do it weekly, three to four times a month from ice out until the end of September.

The procedure is very straightforward, not complicated, what you do is try to select a day when it's very sunny out, preferably calm, clear and bright sun, and I paddle out to the deepest part of the lake well away from any streams or other known discharge points.

Here's the secchi disc, the more recent models are painted half black and half white but this one still does the job.

So sort of position myself so that the shady side is to my right.

So I'll be dropping this down and carefully watch it go down without tipping the kayak.

I go between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:30 or 3:00 p.m. when the sun is most directly over the water that way you're assured when you watch the disc disappear you are getting the strongest possible solar rays coming down and hitting off of it.

So I just lowered it until I couldn't see the disc anymore and then I slightly raised it until I could see it again and the water surface was at this point, this red mark on the rope at that point where it was just into invisibility.

So now I will count the markings on here and we'll find out how clear the water is right now today at almost 11:00 am.

So I got 11.5 ft of clarity, couple of days ago it was 12 ft so essentially not much change.

So the other thing I do is just hold a thermometer in the water for a little while and see how warm it is.

It was up to about 73° or so few days ago, just perfect for swimming.

So that's really all there is to it to taking the reading, you can see how simple it is.

Later in September this data can be digitally entered online or just sent mail in a paper copy and then you stay on the list and next year you get a friendly letter from the Citizen Lake Monitoring Program of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and they will say are you ready to do this again and you say yes.

We know that all of these lakes in the lake country of Minnesota have incredible pressure both from day use, also from residences.

It used to be just weekend cabins, they are frequently being transformed into year round homes.

Sometimes people bring their notions of a clean yard to the Northwoods.

The clean yard look implies a lawn that will be mowed, fertilized all the way down to the edge of the water, and what happens when rain falls it falls on a sloping lawn and any excess nutrients get, whether it's grass clippings or fertilizer or pesticides gets washed down into the lake.

So yes there is a real, a very good reason to monitor the health of these lakes because the water clarity will be affected by the increased nutrient loading that feeds the algae that colors the water that produces blue-green algae and decreases the usability of a lake.

Those who have a choice and choose to live up in this country are choosing it because of the lakes, because of the woods, because of the exceptional amount of green we have compared to the man-made structures in urban areas.

It's that sense of giving back, of being invested, of caring and much as you care for your friends and relatives, the lakes and woods are supporting you too and deserve as much care and oversight.

This is such an easy way to contribute to a large database, to get you out on your lake on a regular basis, and it's an example to your neighbors, too.

It's part of our lifestyle.

We are so fortunate to have clean lakes, wildlife, showy lady slippers, loons.

It's a very simple, easy way to give back.

This program is really great because our volunteers are able to increase our capacity as a state agency and increase the amount of water monitoring that we are able to do throughout the entire state.

We simply don't have enough staff or time to make it out to all of the water bodies across Minnesota because there's tons of them so since we have over a thousand volunteers who in 2021 monitored over 1500 different bodies of water, they are able to collect data year after year and so we're able to build long-term trends of water clarity and so these long-term trends are able to tell us whether quality is increasing or decreasing over time.

Anyone can be a volunteer.

We have retirees, we have kids and their parents, we have school groups, church groups, YMCA camps, Boy Scout, Girl Scout groups, anybody can be a volunteer that's able to go out twice a month during the summertime to your favorite body of water.

We have thousands and thousands of monitoring sites all over the state that still need volunteers, tons and tons of lakes still need a volunteer, and then so many stream sites all over the state.

Maybe it takes 15 minutes of your time and obviously if you have a river or stream or lake right in your backyard that's easy to get out and you could probably do it once a week, that would be the ideal.

We rather have people doing it once a week at an easy to get to location so they continue to do it without any difficulty than to say oh yeah I'll be a Boundary Waters monitor and then, you know, turns out you're not actually able to do the several hundred miles to get there every time.

So anybody, everybody regardless of their ability to commit time to this would be welcome.

You can do a little bit or you can do a lot.

Let's say you're not a kayaker and you just on occasion go to the beach on Lake Marquette, which is fed by the Schoolcraft River, you might think well I don't really need to care too much about the science of water quality.

Well yeah you do because that particular beach is one that has seen incidents of blue-green algae.

It's something that all of us need to care about, not just those who want pristine conditions when we go kayaking or bird watching, anybody who takes a dip in a lake when it's hot here this matters.

Even if you never going anywhere near the water, our economy in this area is based on fishing and outdoor recreation, heavily influenced by that.

If nobody wants to come here because you can't swim in the lakes, you can't go fishing because the fish are dying out, the economy is going to tank and that's something that concerns all of us.

It's just something that I feel is very important for the long-term health of all of the lakes in Minnesota.

The value of this program, the Citizen Lake Monitoring Program.

Getting more data and consistent data is what's the most important to this program and to the agency and also getting more people outside in nature and having fun out there.

Our volunteers are absolutely invaluable to us as an agency we would not be able to get all of this monitoring done without the volunteers across the state so it really is awesome that they're able to help us and also gain firsthand knowledge of their own local waters.

If you're willing to go out every month, every week to a water body near where you live then that helps the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency monitor what's going on over the whole state.

It helps them build a database from year to year and it helps us, helps me to know what's going on in my backyard.

We are in seeing the changes and what causes the changes from time to time when we're sampling start to care more about what's going on in that river.

The next step from collecting information is caring and then conservation.

Next thing you know you might be going to speak to a city council meeting or a county commission meeting about you know what I've been monitoring this site and now I'm finding blue-green algae and this is something that concerns my neighbors and I think that local government needs to know about it and do something about it.

So it's kind of two things, the scientific aspect of it and the neighbor aspect of it making sure that we can conserve a habitat well where we live.

Thank you for watching Common Ground.

If you have an idea for a Lakeland PBS production in north central Minnesota email us at legacy@lptv.org or call 1-800-292-0922.

To watch Lakeland PBS productions online visit lptv.org or download the free PBS app.

Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information is available at bemidjiairport.org.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.