By James Matthews
Collecting lake health data now can contribute to future safe water quality.
The U-Links Centre for Community-based Research has been keeping an eye for a few years on the water quality in Haliburton County’s lakes. Work is about to make waves for the 2025 season and county council got an overview of what the season is likely to entail.
Andrew Gordon, the director at U-Links, said research projects the organization has helped make possible over the years with groups, students, and universities and colleges has contributed to the county being a special place.
“The collective nature of those projects has brought more vitality and made Haliburton County a better place to live, work, and breathe,” he said.
The various local lake associations approached U-Links with so much water quality data and looked for feedback in what to do with all of it.
Water quality is crucial to an area in which property values, tourism dollars, recreational opportunities, and its economic future depends upon the integrity of its 600 lakes and other waterways.
No small measure of safe water’s importance is the about two billion cubic metres of water supplied to local municipalities.
“A well-tuned water quality testing program is going to be one way you’re going to be able to do this in perpetuity,” Gordon said.
Some of the things that affects water quality and general lake health is septic systems, shoreline vegetation removal, microplastics, and the introduction of invasive species. Some watercraft use contributes to habitat destruction and shoreline erosion.
“All of these problems are understood and collectively, working together across all political stripes, we will be able to deal with them,” he said.
Something that’s become regrettably common has been an increase in blue-green algae blooms.
“These are very nasty, toxic things that can actually kill people,” Gordon said. “And we have seen in Haliburton County over the last eight to 10 years a serious increase in them.”
He said the Testing the Waters Program began in 2022 with 10 lake associations and has since grown to include 25 associations across 39 lakes at 61 sites. Those are the region’s largest, most utilized lakes.
The sites include biological monitoring at some, chemical and physical water quality monitoring at others, and a combination of those two tests at a third clutch of sites.
“Most of our lakes that we’ve been sampling now are at the five-year point so we’re going to be able to start to put together a county-wide picture on the health of lakes,” he said.
Jim Prince, the co-chairperson at U-Links and chairperson at Woodlands and Waterways EcoWatch, said data from a number of testing programs and groups has also been collected and will be incorporated into a picture of health.
The Testing the Waters Program has so far conducted more than 6,600 physical water quality measurements and 2,900 water chemistry samples over 1,300 volunteer hours by more than 150 volunteers.
Prince said that most water quality test results show excellent to good results when compared to Stocking Lake, which is their reference lake. Total phosphorus is steadily trending up while water clarity has dropped since the 1990s.
“That’s an indication of nutrient loading in the lakes (and) definitely some climate change impacts,” he said.
Waterfront property owners can properly manage their septic systems and work to maintain natural shorelines to sustain good water quality.
“The best part is every municipality in the county are doing work in those areas,” he said.
Councillor Cecil Ryall, the deputy mayor of Highlands East, said the on-going war against blue-green algae is everybody’s concern.
“When the lakes go to sleep in the fall and wake up in the spring, does the algae die with it and then regrow?” he said. “The second part of that same question, is it cyclic in the sense that it grows to a certain point, dies off, and then it ends there?”
“I don’t know about blooms under the ice,” Gordon said. “But typically an indicator of whether there’s going to be a bloom or not is the total phosphorus.”
He said blooms tend to be related to weather conditions that are hot and calm with a stirred up lake bottom.
“Usually that’s when the blooms will occur,” he said, and added that the muck on the lake bottom is where the phosphorus is.
“I think what’s really evident here is how much we don’t know,” said Coun. Bob Carter, the mayor of Minden Hills. “And the best way of trying to determine whether there is something that is important happening is to be able to track something consistently over a long period of time.”
