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~~~°~o ®a Continued from page 1 of other lake, river and wetland moni- toring efforts that encourage volunteers to get their feet and hands wet in the pursuit of clean, healthy water: The programs have two major goals: First, there is the science. The thou- sands of volunteers take far more water clarity readings and collect far more water samples than the full-time scien- tists and technicians employed by gov- ernmental bodies, such as the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and local soil and water boards, ever could handle. A recent surge in the use of volunteers to collect water samples has helped the PCA speed up a slow process aimed at assessing the water quality in more than 12,000 lakes and about 105,000 miles of streams and rivers every 10 years. Big increases in water quality spending approved by the Legislature in recent years paid for lab analysis of the samples. The low-tech Secchi Disk readings made by those volunteers leaning over the sides of their canoes and pontoon boats also help make possible a much higher-tech monitoring system. The clar- ity readings logged by the volunteers are used to calibrate images sent to Earth by satellites that pass over Minnesota. As important as the scientific data, is the direct interest in water quality and the commitment to preserving it that the volunteer activity fosters in the people who volunteer. "There's value beyond the value of the data that's collected in the Citizen. Lake Monitoring Program, said Johanna Schussler, the Minnesota Pollution Con- trol. Agency's coordinator of the program. "These are the people who support water quality initiatives. These are the people who volunteer; who write letters." And what do the volunteers get out of participating in the various programs? For Gordon Prickett, a former min- ing engineer who joined the Citizen Lake Monitoring Program in 1997, soon after he bought his retirement home on the north side of Nord Lake in Aitkin County, the question is an easy one. "I see myself as a steward here," Prickett said. "The longer we live here, the more I'm interested in conservation and preservation. I'm interested in pre- serving the quality of the lake for future generations, as well as my own." Josiah Detwiler measures water clarity on Ester Lake in the Boundary Waters. Minnesota's first volunteer water- quality program was begun in 1973 by a University of Minnesota professor, Joe Shapiro. The MPCA assumed responsi- bility for the program in 1978. That is the Citizen Lake Monitoring Project that Schussler coordinates. Last year, it had 1,260 volunteers who tested water quality at 1,700 sites on about 1,200 lakes. From the beginning, the program has relied on a simple device, the Secchi Disk, to measure clarity, a basic indicator of water quality, especially the level of algae present in a lake. The Secchi disk-named after Pietro Angelo Secchi, a 19th Century Jesuit astronomer who developed the device to measure the transparency of oceans and lakes-is a white, or sometimes black- and-white, metal disk, about the size of a salad plate that is attached to a cord marked off in feet or meters. Volunteers are instructed to lower the Secchi disk into the lake and note when it disappears from view. They then raise the disk a bit until it is again just vis- ible, note that depth and then average the two readings. The volunteers also fill out a questionnaire rating the lake's general appearance on a scale that ranges from "crystal clear" to "massive floating scums...foul odor or fish kill." The volunteers are asked to take their readings on their appointed lakes eight to 10 times a summer, preferably weekly. Typically, the clarity readings the volunteers record with the Secchi disks are lowest in mid-summer, when algae growth is the greatest. The Secchi read- ings are posted each year in the MPCA's Environmental Data Access data base. In addition to the basic Secchi disk monitoring, the MPCA funds four other citizen monitoring programs: A sub-set of the basic Secchi disk monitoring program that is specifically tailored for canoeists visiting the Bound- ary Waters Canoe Area wilderness. Canoeists receive alight-weight Secchi disk with a little mesh bag on the bottom of it that they weight down with rocks. A Citizen Stream Monitoring Pro- gram, begun in 1988, that last year sent about 500 volunteers to about 800 loca- tions on rivers and streams throughout Minnesota. The volunteers generally use a bucket to take a sample of water and then measure its clarity. But, instead of a Secchi disk, they use a transparency tube. That's a clear tube with a centimeter scale printed on it that the volunteers fill with river or stream water. Then they let water run out of valve on the bottom until they can. see a symbol printed on the base of the tube. The river and stream monitors are asked to visit their sampling stations once a week, from April through Sep- tember, and after heavy rains. The clarity readings they make with their transpar- ency tubes are used by the MPCA to estimate the level of turbidity caused by suspended solids-sediment, organic material and algae-in the water. A relatively new lake monitoring effort, called the Advanced Citizen Lake Monitoring Program, in which volun- teers who have demonstrated a com- mitment to monitoring by taking Secchi readings for two years, receive addi- tional training and more-sophisticated equipment and are asked to undertake expanded testing on selected lakes. In that program, the volunteers take " FACETS March 2009