News from the Alberta Recreational Lakes Forum 2017

Alberta Environment and Parks organized this year's forum at Lake Isle west of Edmonton. Several forum documents and presentations are filed in this online SLWSS folder. The SLWSS did not attend this year's forum as the need for input from community stewardship groups has declined. We did provide this report on our 2016 activities and projects: …

Sylvan Lake Shoreline Impairment Video Surveys

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 …

The Atlas of Alberta Lakes is now online

The Atlas, first published as a printed report in 1990, has been digitized and is available here. Sylvan Lake is part of the South Saskatchewan Region. Maps and data for some lakes monitored by Alberta Environment and Parks may be found here. Also refer to the Respect Our Lakes web page and the AEP Lake Information …

Status Report on Sylvan Lake Water Quality in 2016

This is an interim report on the results of Sylvan Lake  water quality sampling between May and September 2016. Previous posts have illustrated the joint SLWSS-ALMS project in action on the high seas. The teamwork of ALMS lake technician Breda Muldoon, able crew members from the SLWSS, and boat captain Ed Thiessen of Norglenwold allowed …

The SLWSS no longer participates in the affairs of the Sylvan Lake Management Committee

The eight local municipalities of the Sylvan Lake Management Committee (SLMC) administer land within the boundary of the Sylvan Lake Watershed under the powers of the Municipal Government Act. The SLMC has no statutory authority but functions as a point of contact for common inter-municipal issues. The SLWSS and some regulatory agencies like Alberta Environment and Parks (AEP) have …

The Sylvan Lake watershed gets a charge from a University of Calgary geophysics team

A field research team led by Profs. Rachel Lauer and Larry Bentley investigated groundwater aquifer structures on October 22 along a stretch of Range Road 25 at the west end of Sylvan Lake. The field team of geophysics students (L to R) Daniel Kent-O'Donnell, Malcolm MacDougall, Rachel Deschenes and Jen Hanlon with Profs Lauer and …

Golf Course Creek Meets Sylvan Lake-2016-07-16

A few millimetres of rain in the last week: Precipitation in 2016 measured at the Alberta Agriculture weather station at Hespero. has increased the stormwater runoff from the Golf Course Creek catchment and transported another load of suspended solids into Sylvan Lake through Marina Bay: View of the turbidity of Golf Course Creek on the …

Watershed Stewardship at CARL 2016

The 2016 Central Alberta Recreational Lakes forum, held at the Best Western Chateau Inn on Saturday May 14, attracted 46 lake participants from as far north as Lac Isle and many staff from government departments and agencies. Watch this blog for links to the presentations after the organizer, Janine Higgins of Alberta Environment and Parks, posts …

SLWSS VP Susan Samson Leads the Urgent Care Campaign

Click here to read the feature article on the Urgent Care project in the Sylvan Lake News edition of April 21. While our Watershed Stewardship Society priorities are a healthy environment and Sylvan Lake's water quality, watershed residents and visitors must be healthy too, and have quick access to emergency services 24/7. Please visit the Urgent Care …

More Turbid Stormwater from the Town Enters Sylvan Lake

More intense rainfall has added an additional load of entrained solids from stripped and cleared land and exposed development excavations within the Golf Course Creek catchment. Precipitation reports from three weather stations show the range and intensity across the Central Alberta area west of Sylvan Lake (click to enlarge the image): Some of that turbid stormwater …