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Monitoring Results
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Citizen Lake Monitoring 2008: A Year in ReviewDuring the 2008 monitoring season:
Wisconsin lakes are under stress from pollution, loss of habitat and more recently aquatic invasive species (AIS). The state has too few resources to monitor all 15,000 lakes and for decades has depended on citizen volunteers for help. At UW Lakes Extension, the Citizen Volunteer Monitoring Network (CLMN) is working with Clean Boats Clean Waters (CBCW), Wisconsin DNR, Wisconsin Association of Lakes (WAL), county and regional Extension and others in a statewide partnership to prevent the spread of and monitor for AIS. UWEX-Lakes has evolved CLMN training sessions to include AIS monitoring protocols and has taken the lead in training staff (UWEX, County Extension, Basin Educators, RC&D, DNR, etc.) to train volunteers as well as host monitoring workshops. Now, most AIS "new finds" are discovered by trained volunteers and lakes residents allowing earlier detection and rapid response. CLMN monitors secchi clarity, chemistry, temperature, dissolved oxygen, aquatic plants and AIS (Fig. 3). The goal is to expand the less expensive monitoring while maintaining and slightly expanding the more costly chemistry, temperature, dissolved oxygen and plant monitoring opportunities. Retention and the term length of volunteers are excellent. Twenty four volunteers are still actively participating after 20 years. According to the longer term data, water quality on a majority of lakes is stable. On some lakes water quality has improved and sadly on a few, water quality has declined. To assure collection of accurate data, quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) tests were done in 2008. Randomly selected volunteers (representing about 10% of the total number of stations monitored for chemistry) collected field blanks and duplicates during their July or August sampling event to help detect any analytical problems during sampling, transport and lab analysis. Last Revised:
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