Volunteers are needed to help monitor the water quality in northwest Iowa’s Great Lakes region.
Megan Vigdal, an environmental lab analyst at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, says they need help with what’s known as CLAMP, the Cooperative Lakes Area Monitoring Program, an effort that’s been underway every summer for more than 25 years.
“It’s a volunteer lake monitoring project that we have here in the Great Lakes that started in 1999,” Vigdal says. “Like it states, it’s mostly volunteer. Volunteers go out and collect water samples and they bring them back to Lakeside and they get analyzed for different nutrients and parameters in the water.”
Vigdal says ten different lakes in Dickinson County are included in the program, and the test results are vital in keeping close tabs on the waterways.
“We’ve been able to see changes or fluctuations in the lake, especially with the flood years,” she says. “We get to see flood and drought, if there’s different nutrient things happening, or with the zebra mussels. In some of the bigger lakes, we can see if it’s a big zebra mussel year based on the water clarity.”
Vigdal says there are only a few requirements to become a volunteer.
“You usually go out with a couple other volunteers onto one of the lakes,” she says. “You pick up bottles and some things here at Lakeside Lab and you go out and you use a couple hand meters to read things like temperature and dissolved oxygen, and then collect some water and put it in bottles and bring it back.”
A volunteer training session will be held on Thursday at 6 PM at the Mahan Hall building at Iowa Lakeside Lab.
(By Ed Funston, KILR, Estherville)