Sylvan Lake Watershed Stewardship Society
Protecting the lake's natural assets and values through vigilance and science.
The Sylvan Lake shoreline has been surveyed twice using airborne video cameras to record the impairment of the riparian zone by property owners, once in 2002 for the Alberta Conservation Association and again in 2007 by Alberta SRD together with Fisheries and Oceans. These are valuable records of the cumulative effects of human impact on …
Continue reading "Sylvan Lake Shoreline Impairment Video Surveys"
Learn how to build a Geographic Information System for your Alberta watershed by using this starter kit from the Sylvan Lake Watershed Stewardship Society. The process involves downloading free software, acquiring georeferenced data for your land and lake area, and creating maps that will help you to understand and make better decisions about your watershed. Click on the AltaLIS …
The brand new SLWSS Geographic Information System (GIS) demonstrated at CARL 2016 received rave reviews from participants. Two mapping technologies, QGIS and Google Earth Pro, have been applied to compile and display watershed information for stewardship applications. Here are a few examples: Note: Click on any image to enlarge it Where is the boundary of the watershed.? It …
Continue reading "Geographic Information System for the Sylvan Lake Watershed"
Blayne West, environmental coordinator for Lacombe County and member of the board of directors of the Sylvan Lake Watershed Stewardship Society, will depart from Canada with her family and return to Australia where summer never ends. Blayne helped to develop and manage Lacombe County's environmental policy and practices and contributed to the Cumulative Effects Management System (CEMS) …
Continue reading "Blayne West Leaves Lacombe County for Australia"
The Sylvan Lake Report - Second Edition is our brand new Society handbook on the lake and watershed. See the Table of Contents here. The report presents critical cumulative information on the state of our watershed. It summarizes historical data on the lake and its watershed land compiled from a variety of public sources and makes …
You can always tell when something is important because someone, somewhere organizes a conference and invites experts from around the world to attend. This time, Winnipeg will be the host of the 19th International Conference on Aquatic Invasive Species. See the preliminary program posted here. Even with elevated awareness and vigilance throughout North America, Lake Winnipeg has severe …
Jason Cooper, senior fisheries biologist in the Red Deer office of Alberta Environment and Parks, knows everything about the Sylvan Lake fishery. He catches, counts and reports on fish as part of the Fall Walleye Index Netting program to assess the number, size and age of species that live in the the lake. Here's how it's …
Alberta Agriculture and Forestry (AB Ag) research on nutrient transport has evolved over two decades is relevant to the situation in the Sylvan Lake watershed. About 67% of the land area within the watershed boundary is used for agriculture. Those uses are also diffuse sources of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) nutrients as a result of the cycle of growth …
Continue reading "Keep Nutrients on the Land……..Not in the Lake"
The first Sylvan Lake macrophyte survey report is posted on the ALMS website. Here's how Alyssa Cloutier, our ALMS lake tech in 2014, and marine assistant SLWSS director Devon Shouldice, collected data on aquatic plants that grow in the littoral zone near the lake shore: The entire perimeter of Sylvan Lake was sampled mainly in 500 m …
Decision-making about ways and means to protect and preserve the Sylvan Lake watershed is limited by the lack of information on its value. The methods used by environmental economists who study ecosystems are explained on a website maintained by the US Department of Agriculture. The following paragraph is an excerpt that introduces a few methods …
