Learning and lake monitoring with local Youth and Stewardship Groups
Living Lakes Canada team member, Kayla Harris holding a Van Dorn water sampler containing a freshwater sample collected from Premier Lake, Skookumchuck B.C.
What better way is there to enjoy the first days of summer than heading out to a beautiful local lake? Well, the team at Living Lakes Canada would suggest practising lake monitoring while you’re there — and a LakeKeepers workshop will give you the knowledge and skills you need!
Living Lakes Canada recently co-hosted a LakeKeepers workshop with the BC Lake Stewardship Society (BCLSS) in the Columbia Valley, B.C. Participating groups included the Columbia Lake Stewardship Society, Lake Windermere Ambassadors, and Wildsight’s Kimberley-Cranbrook Youth Climate Corps. This 1.5-day workshop gave these groups the opportunity to learn more about lake health assessments and lake ecology.
The first day of in-class learning walked participants through the fundamentals. Norm Zirnhelt, Executive Director of BCLSS, led the group in discussions about lake classifications, how lake health is being affected by climate change, and water monitoring principles. The second portion of the workshop, held at Premier Lake near Skookumchuck, gave participants hands-on experience using different water quality assessment tools such as the Van Dorn water sampler and Secchi disk.
“The LakeKeepers Training workshops offered by BCLSS are of utmost importance in supporting Citizen-Based Water Monitoring Programs,” Norm shares. “Although the focus of the training is lake monitoring and ecology, many of the concepts and principles apply to stream and river monitoring as well. This workshop grew from the need to support volunteers conducting monitoring programs by providing the necessary technical training to ensure high quality data is collected that may ultimately be used for decision making… It is crucial going forward that funding is provided by water program funders to enable the offering of these valuable workshops.”
BCLSS has been facilitating LakeKeepers workshops since 2009 with the goal of better equipping the public to steward lakes through a greater understanding of the watershed and land-use impacts. Regionally-based LakeKeepers courses also create peer-to-peer learning opportunities through networking and can address issues and concerns specific to the location.
Living Lakes Canada program manager, Camille LeBlanc, acknowledged that “the dedication BCLSS has shown in providing high-quality education for community scientists and water stewardship organizations is commendable and has led to great province-wide water monitoring projects. We look forward to continuing to support their work and working alongside them for the betterment of lake communities across B.C.”
To learn more about the LakeKeepers program, follow the link here: https://www.bclss.org/programs#lakekeepers
And check out the informative BCLSS LakeKeepers manual.
