The Lake Winnipeg Community-Based Monitoring Network

Manitoba is home to many different lakes, such as Lake Winnipeg, the Earth’s tenth largest freshwater lake in the world (Mann, Anger and). The lake inhabits millions of fish and numerous beaches rest aside it’s shores. Although, upon the surface, clusters of tiny bluish green microorganisms can be seen. These organisms have invaded 50% of the lakes surface. (Burns, H20 and). The scientific name of these organisms are called “cyanobacteria” or in simpler terms, “blue green algae” Primarily, the presence of algae is regular on any body of water as it’s growth is promoted through nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen. So it would be completely normal for algae to be seen on the lake. Although, for the past ten years, Lake Winnipeg has suffered

Although, Lake Winnipeg’s large body of 25,000 square kilometres makes it overwhelming to the point where the Government and environmentalists don’t know where to start. (Burns, Lake Winnipeg). Fortunately, The Lake Winnipeg Foundation is in the process of settling the “Lake Winnipeg Community-Based Monitoring Network”. This network will encourage citizens to take on the role of scientists and they will collect samples of different parts of the lake and send them to labs to test for levels of phosphorus. This will help scientists and the government gain knowledge of areas in the lake that are most at risk, leading them to take direct action. An obvious measure scientists would take is to reduce the nutrients in the lake. Based on this idea, Manitoba launched the “Lake Winnipeg Basin Initiative” in August 2012 with an investment of $18 million. In hopes up restoring the ecological lake of Lake Winnipeg by encouraging citizens to take part in the initiative, reducing transboundary pollution, working in close relations with other governments within the basin and improving water quality for the fishing industry and for recreational use. This initiative was set to happen from 2012-2017 (5 years). (Canada, Lake Winnipeg). Unfortunately, as of 2017 after the five year effort to lessen the phosphorus in Lake Winnipeg the decrease was less than 1%. Some actually found this decrease to be impressive as the quantity of phosphorus was immense. In hopes of increasing that percentage, Manitoba then launched a program called “Growing Outcomes in Watersheds program” A program which gives financial incentives to encourage farmers to adopt agricultural practices that involve less phosphorus. This will help reduce the amount of phosphorus getting into the lake through agricultural field runoff. (MacLean, After 5) As of now, 20-40% of phosphorus runoff that flows into Lake Winnipeg is insoluble.