(Wahpeton)– The Cooperative Lakes Area Monitoring Project, or CLAMP, is entering its 26th season of keeping track of water quality on each of the Iowa Great Lakes, along with Little Spirit Lake, Center Lake and Silver Lake at Lake Park. Megan Vigdal, co-coordinator of CLAMP, tells KUOO news what it’s all about…
“It is a citizen’s science volunteer project that has been going since 1999, so we’re going to be working on our 26th summer collection season. We rely on volunteers from the area to help us go out onto the 10 area lakes and collect water samples and they bring them back here to Lakeside Lab and they get analyzed for various things like nitrates and PH and temperature and phosphorous levels.”
She says it’s something people of all ages can participate in…
“We get families, we get grandparents, grandkids and some have boats and some don’t. They’re able to get trained on the different equipment that we use here at Lakeside Lab, and then they get their schedule coordinated throughout the summer. We have people go out seven times a summer: two times in June, two times in July, two times in August and once in September. A few people like to go out just once a summer to kind of experience it, but we also have some volunteers that go out multiple times a summer.”
Vigdal adds CLAMP is the longest running and the most extensive lake monitoring program in Iowa…
“It’s important to keep tabs on these different nutrients in the lakes so we can see the trends. If there’s something that looks a little different than the year before, the past five years, we can see the trends if we need to take action or contact the DNR and see if there’s like a nitrate increase or maybe during drought years we’re able to see different nutrients drop or rise depending on what’s going on. We’re really excited to have our data from last year from the post increase flooding levels to see what happens in the next couple of years to see what the affects have.”
Vigdal says some training sessions for anyone interested in volunteering for the program this summer will be held next week…
“They’re all the same so anybody that’s interested just needs to attend one, you don’t need to attend all of them. We will have one Tuesday, May 27th at 2:00 pm; Wednesday, May 28th at 10:00 in the morning; and then Thursday, May 29th at 6:00 pm at night. So we kind of have a broad range of days and times and of course if none of those work, please feel free to contact me and we can work something out. We’d love to have all the volunteers that we can.”
All of the sessions will be held at Lakeside Lab on Highway 86 in Wahpeton.
