Monitoring the health of freshwater ecosystems, as accurately and comprehensively as possible, is crucial for understanding the impacts of human activity and climate change.
But freshwater lakes are ever changing, and we can’t always be in field monitoring them in person. That’s why, here at the world’s freshwater laboratory, we have been implementing innovative methods for real-time, ‘in situ’ (or ‘on site’) monitoring of lakes, allowing for comprehensive data collection without the need for our constant field presence, and ensuring minimal ecological impact.
This basically means deploying equipment into a lake that stays in place, tracks various aspects of the health and state of that body of water, and then transmits those data, in real-time, to our laptops or mobile devices.
In order to understand the health of our freshwater lakes, and then develop effective practice and policy solutions to tackle threats, we need continuous, high-resolution data to build a comprehensive picture of the impacts of human activity, climate change, and pollution on freshwater ecosystems.
Traditionally, monitoring a lake often involves periodic field visits that span hours, which can miss critical events and take up precious time and resources.
In contrast, the real-time data transmission enabled by ‘in-situ’ monitoring provides a continuous stream of information. This higher degree of temporal resolution allows scientists to promptly detect and respond to changes in water quality and ecosystem health, while dedicating their time and resources to other critical tasks.
Well, we do have to leave our desks sometimes.
This is mostly to set up and maintain the five major pieces of equipment that we use for our ‘in-situ’ approach to lake monitoring. These are: standardized dataloggers, radio telemetry systems, temperature strings, YSIs (multi-parameter water quality sensors), and Aquahive telemetry units.
We install them in our Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) lakes as well as the lakes on which we are currently experimenting, allowing us to collect, transmit and receive environmental data continuously.
The ‘in-situ’ monitoring technology provides a wealth of information about the state of our lakes. By measuring water temperature at various depths, we gain insights into thermal stratification and mixing processes, which are crucial for aquatic life and nutrient cycling.
Monitoring phosphorous levels helps us manage and prevent eutrophication, a major problem in freshwater lakes around the globe. This includes monitoring pollutants and nutrients that affect water quality and aquatic life and allows us to assess the impacts of human activities and develop effective mitigation strategies.
Tracking dissolved oxygen levels ensures that our lakes can support healthy ecosystems, as oxygen is essential for the survival of aquatic organisms. Additionally, measuring pH and conductivity provides insights into the overall health of the water, indicating potential pollution or other environmental changes.
Collecting these data continuously allows us to capture events like sudden spikes in a pollutant, algal blooms, or temperature shifts that could be missed with periodic sampling. This real-time information is invaluable for making informed decisions about lake management and conservation efforts, ensuring we can promptly respond to and mitigate any emerging threats to our fresh water.
We have been working hard to deploy in-situ monitoring systems in many of our current key research projects and the lakes on which we work.
All of our long-term environmental research lakes have been equipped with standardized in-situ monitoring equipment. For instance, Lake 239 features a YSI profiler. It is essential to calculate the inflow and outflow of water from Lake 239 to grasp water movement in the region and to create similar water and chemical budgets for other lakes.
Lake 227 is a notable example where Aquahive telemetry units have been deployed. In June 2020, we installed a sensor and AquaHive low-latency telemetry platform in the lake’s surface water. This system records and transmits temperature, chlorophyll a, blue green phycocyanin concentration, and fluorescence data every hour directly to our laptops. In simple terms, the AquaHive enables us to monitor freshwater in real-time. This summer, we’re expanding our real-time data transmission onto Lake 303 and Lake 304.