(Spirit Lake)– A major water quality restoration project is getting underway on a shallow lake in the Iowa Great Lakes chain.
Marble Lake is a 166 acre natural prairie pothole lake near Big Spirit Lake. It has a maximum depth of about seven feet. Chris LaRue of the Iowa DNR’s Great Lakes Wildlife Unit says crews are drawing down the lake this fall…
“We’ll work on drawing the system down as low as we can get it before we go into the winter. That will help us get the system ready for next year, or we’ll keep it down pretty much as low as we can keep it, throughout the 2027 growing season, again to really help establish really good aquatic vegetation for long term water quality benefits in order to ge the system renovated back into a state that we would certainly like to see it.”
LaRue says Marble Lake is a critical biological buffer as it’s within the Kettleson Hogsback Wildlife Complex and plays an important role in filtering waterflow…
“You know, a good percentage of the watershed that comes down through there of course is, through Marble Lake, is very key for obviously, Big Spirit Lake. It’s in our best interest to keep the system in the best condition we can and that is why the efforts were made back in 2014-’15 when we did the first restoration effort on Marble, and we’ve been fortunate. We got ten good years out of that work and thankfully we have the infrastructure and stuff to work on it and get it back into good condition again.”
LaRue says the project on Marble Lake is expected to take a little more than a year to complete but he says that’s conditional…
“Our goal is basically to, you know, it will take from now until through probably fall of next year when we’ll start to allow water levels to start to slowly start creeping back up. That’s as long as we see the vegetative response we’d like to see in the lake and to make sure we don’t need to continue working on rough fish or something like that.”
Information on similar restoration projects can be found at iowadnr.gov.
