 Yes, hi everyone. Welcome. Here we are again. I want to apologize for the back area. We're having a flea market. I shouldn't say we because we're not. The church is having a flea market tomorrow. So I did a little shopping. I mean, I didn't buy, but you know, somebody came in and said, maybe I'll get that rug. So I don't know about you, but I don't need any more stuff. So I wanted to just mention that I've talked a few times about you can look next Thursday on CCTVs website or TV for the lecture. They are working out some technical difficulties, not this fellow because he's fabulous, but other people at the station are working out some technical difficulties. So as soon as we are on track, I hope it'll be next week, maybe then you can look the following Thursday, but lectures will be archived on CCTV. So if you miss one or you see one that you want to listen to again, we'll keep you posted. So I'll mention it next week. Also, for those of you on zoom, please know that you can start asking questions online. Kathy Chamberlain is monitoring that you go to touch your screen if it's a computer at the bottom, there'll be Q&A, touch that and type it in. If it's an iPad, it'll be at the top, touch it, email the question in. We really want your question so we can involve you in this process. Next week, we have, I think you received an email and Betty Nave, and I'm going to make her walk up here. She's the chairman of our special events committee. We said we were going to do this walk on Wednesday, but you know what now we're doing on Thursday because Wednesday looks like it's going to rain. So hopefully it's Thursday at 1030. If you want to see Betty, there she is, wave your hand. After the lecture, she can sign you up, answer questions. It should be really fun. So walk next Thursday, 1030 at Meach Cove in Shelburne. I do want to ask you to turn your cell phones off, please. Now I'd like to introduce our speaker. So our speaker today is Colleen Hickey. She lives in South Hero in Georgia, Vermont, but was raised in Goffstown, New Hampshire. She's a UNH alum. She picked up her MS at Doc Tufts, and I don't think you just pick it up. It's pretty tough there. Then moved to Vermont to join the new Lake Champlain Basin Program. She has delivered public messaging about watershed issues through the Lake Champlain Basin Program since 1991. Presenting school and public programs and listening to the public's Lake stories are her favorite parts of the job. Colleen has witnessed many physical changes in Lake Champlain since the 70s when she played on Georgia shore with her cousins and siblings. I know we're all anxious to hear about her observations. Please welcome her. She's going to speak on the state of the lake. We want an ecosystem indicators report. Thank you to Colleen. Give her a welcome. Thank you very much for that introduction. So my name is Colleen. I've been with the program forever, longer than Peter Kreisel almost, who has been a longtime committee member until 10 or 12 years ago. So I joined the basin program in 1990, and I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you about the state of the lake report. We produce this report every three years through the Lake Champlain Basin Program, working with a group of scientific advisors from New York, Vermont, and Quebec. Some people say, why do you only do it every three years? Well, the data is still being collected year to year, but the data really, we need about three years to show changes in trends over time. So that's why it's about every three years. The Lake Champlain Basin program, just a little shout out, is located up in Grand Isle, Vermont. But we also, for the 20 years that the Echo Lake Center has been here, we have run the resource room on the second floor of Echo. And we have staff in there seven days a week. So if you ever have a question, there is staff available to help from nine to five, seven days a week, over 20 years. It's pretty remarkable. And it's a great project. Judy Allard has been a long time volunteer there, and Judy is also, I don't know if you realize, but the formerly the AP Environmental Science teacher out of Burlington High School. So anything that I can't answer today, because I'm not a scientist, let's ask Judy. So let's begin. The Basin program came around in 1990 as a result of federal legislation called the Lake Champlain Special Designation Act. It was introduced by the delegation in both New York and Vermont. And still today, that delegation is paired and working on behalf of you and the Lake Champlain watershed. So it's federally funded. A lot of our funds come in through the Clean Water Act through the Environmental Protection Agency. But we also receive funding from the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, National Park Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has a lot in the game on their own. And they are a member of our governing board, the International Joint Commission, and the Army Corps of Engineers and the US Geological Survey. So there are like eight federal partners working on behalf of the lake. But it's not just about them, we're spending your tax dollars. So you are ultimately involved. And we work with state government, provincial government in Quebec, local government and citizens groups throughout the watershed. So it's a huge, massive organization working on a very large lake ecosystem that's constantly changing. So I feel like we're all in pretty good hands in terms of we have a science-based program with policy managers at a high level working on behalf of this portion of the country. So let's begin. The Lake Champlain watershed is very large, 8,234 square miles in size. The lake itself is about 120 miles long, 56 percent of the watershed or drainage area comes from the state of Vermont, 37 percent comes from the west in New York, and 7 percent lies above the border in Quebec. Quebec uses this lake heavily. If you've ever been to Missisquoie Bay, there are thousands of seasonal units and year-round units on the bay. So even though they have a small percentage of the watershed, Montrealers use this lake as a second home in the summer. So they're very actively engaged in our management process for Lake Champlain. New York, Vermont, and Quebec have pretty much an equal say on our governing board, which is called the steering committee. Then we have three citizens advisory committees from each jurisdiction as well, municipal officials, state officials, and federal officials all convened. They came together in person yay for the first time this week after two years. And it was really nice to see those partnerships continue. So the way the basin program operates is through this pressure state response system, and it recognizes that human pressures on the land are contributing significantly to pollution issues within the lake itself and that all levels of government are trying to combat those issues and reduce the pollution. We look at the state of the scientific information to gauge changes in our behavior over time, and then we formulate responses. How can we do this better? How can we get more people involved? What states need? What funding at which times to try to solve these problems? So it's a pretty common practice in scientific and public policy places with the pressure state response. You're constantly revisiting the different phases that you're in. When we first started the state of the lake report several decades ago, everybody wanted a report card. They wanted to know who was failing and who's getting an A. And we said we can't do that. But what we can do is to develop a series of criteria that we can use to gauge certain things in the lake over time. So these are the ones that we came up with and we're not going to go through all of these today. But there are two things I want to point out. Going across the top on the top row, you will see Missisqua Bay, the Northeast Arm, Mallets Bay, the Main Lake, and the South Lake. Those are what are considered the major sections of Lake Champlain. And I'll show you a graph in a minute. But we have clean water and healthy ecosystem criteria that we're using. And we developed a new one this year. You can barely see it in that beige. It's climate impacts. And we are looking at the changes in the lake in terms of ice coverage. It's phenomenal. And that data goes back to 1906. So it's something we should be keeping an eye on and we added it to this report this time. If you look at the clean water, the blue section on the left hand side, you'll see phosphorus in the lake, phosphorus from rivers, from wastewater treatment facilities, cyanobacteria blooms, and fish consumption advisories. And then for each of these categories, we give it red if we've got an awful lot of work to do or things are not going in the right direction. We give it a yellow if we're making progress or we're starting to backslide on something. It needs quite a bit of attention. And blue means we're doing quite well in that particular target area. So where do you see the blue straight across? Phosphorus from wastewater treatment facilities. They are doing their job and they're doing it well. And the data in this report clarifies exactly how much phosphorus has been reduced through wastewater treatment plants. In your municipalities, you know that they are expensive to operate and they can take up a chunk of the local tax dollars but they're doing their job as designed. Phosphorus from rivers, that gets a mixed grade with three reds going across the board. If you think about the development that occurs in our 8,234 square miles, it's no wonder why we have some reds in this category because this development is occurring all over the watershed. And then phosphorus in the lake, that top line, you'll see three reds and two yellows. So clearly phosphorus is a giant issue on Lake Champlain and we're all working together to try to address it. Cyanobacteria blooms, that third red dot in the first column. So Mrs. Guaibé is red. Mrs. Guaibé has some real concerns with ongoing problems with cyanobacteria and we'll talk about that in more detail. Everybody else is quite yellow. Not everybody else. The other four sections are yellow. Same with fish consumption advisories. We'll talk about mercury in a minute, but we all have fish advisories. Working down to healthy ecosystems, we'll touch upon sea lamprey, aquatic invasive species, and the invasive water chestnut. So those are some of the highlights we'll hit upon today. So if you think about this map north, Mrs. Guaibé is on the left and the south part of the lake is way down there on the right. These are those five sections. Mrs. Guaibé, I'll have to have Elizabeth make a little darker. It's very, very light. St. Alvin's Bay, I'm sure you're all familiar with these segments. We also refer to that section, that maroon color is the northeast arm or the inland sea. That's where my summer camp is. The lovely blue is the main lake. It contains 85% of the water in Lake Champlain. It has deep sections that go down to 400 feet deep, whereas Mrs. Guaibé has an average depth of about 12 or 13 feet. Thus the problems are very different. The fish species are very different. How we recreate on the lake are very different. You don't see those big sailboats from Burlington up on Mrs. Guaibé. It's pretty shallow to navigate, but a lot of Canadians do sail on the lake. They're on the main lake all the time, and they represent a considerable population of sailors on the lake. And then way down south from the Crown Point Bridge, all the way to Whitehall, is the southern part of the lake known as the South Lake. Clean water. So five things we'll quickly cover. The U.S. Clean Water Act, the cyanobacteria blooms, phosphorus, chloride, and our progress on combined sewer overflows. Those are what gets to the media. The media's attention really fast when we're overflowing. So the Clean Water Act, what year are we celebrating for the Clean Water Act? 50. It's 50 years old, October 19th this fall. So the basin program took it upon ourselves to get New York and Vermont, especially to celebrate that. Your tax dollars, my parents' tax dollars, have paid for a heck of a lot of improvements across the country to improve clean drinking water. But this act also pays attention to healthy fish as well as trying to get rivers and lakes swimmable. So swimmable, fishable, drinkable. Those are some of the primary emphasis or points of emphasis behind the Clean Water Act. The majority of the funding I said comes through the Clean Water Act for the basin program when it's the Environmental Protection Agency. And they've been funding us since 1991, where I think it was President Clinton's budget or second President Bush that got it in the, Peter might remember, it became a presidential line item. So it's in there for good. Fishable. So one of the issues we wrestle with is mercury concentration in fish. And it's not just about Lake Champlain. It's about many of the large lakes across the country. Mercury is one of those substances which bio accumulates up the food chain. So the smaller fish have less, the macro invertebrates have even less. But those macro invertebrates, the small bugs in the streams and lakes are eaten by the small fish eaten by the larger fish consumed by the humans. So when you see on the right side of your screen, yellow perch and white perch, see this beige 0.3 line that's running across. That's the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's criteria for mercury. They like our levels in fish if we have to add mercury to be below that level. Are we all below that level? Absolutely not. So small mouth bass, lake trout, walleye or some of this fish species that get monitored not every year. I mean, you can see the dates of data collection here. It's really expensive to monitor for mercury and we weren't seeing giant changes. So the scientists recommend the stages at which we test for mercury. What fish do we eat commonly out of the grocery store that's pretty high in mercury? What does that? Tuna and swordfish, two big ones. So when we think about our lake, what impact it has on us, there are also other fish species that are out there that are not in Champlain. So we've got to be careful about those two. Champlain, I think most of you realize is one of the top, it's been noted as one of the top 10 bass fisheries in the United States. How many of you are anglers? All right, Judy, you got to catch for all of us. How many of you sail or swim in the lake? Okay, just to come, we got to get you out more. So I don't sail, but I do swim in the lake almost every day in the summer at our family camp. So public beaches, how are we doing there for the Clean Water Act? So the good news is, see all this blue on the chart? Over 95% of the days in which we sample water quality on Lake Champlain, 95% of the time, they're great for swimming. So there are two other reasons why beaches close actually. You can see the gold color is beach clothes due to coliform and the green is beach clothes due to cyanobacteria. So cyanobacteria is always common in the news because it's visible. We post the beaches immediately saying, I say we, the municipalities and the states post the beaches immediately. The Lake Champlain Committee takes a look at near shore locations, data that's collected by anywhere between 120 to 200 volunteers every year. Do any of you or any of you cyanobacteria monitors for the Lake Champlain Committee? No, it's another great opportunity. So what happened was the basin program, once cyanobacteria got into the lake and we're going to talk more about that, we monitored the deeper locations in the lake. There are 19 locations in which we have collected data consistently since 1990. But cyanobacteria blooms tend to occur largely in the shallow areas where people swim, kids are in the water and dogs are in the water. And the Lake Champlain Committee said, hey, we can tackle that one. Another example of how federal, state, local partners all working together. So the basin program provides funding to the Lake Champlain Committee. It's the longest running not-for-profit on Lake Champlain. They've been here since the late mid-70s. Lori trains, Lori Fischer is their executive director and she takes charge of the training program for all these volunteers from New York, Vermont and Quebec to sample weekly or sample on special like big rain events, get out there and collect samples for cyanobacteria. That data is reviewed. It's sent to the Department of Health. They look at visual samples so people take photographs of it. And then the Department of Health posts it to their website on a regular basis. Every week they're changing those posts showing you where the good water is, where you need to stay away from. Quite often a cyanobacteria will blow in near shore for a day and it'll blow back out later that afternoon. So it's very transient. So the good news here is 95% of the time you're getting good water quality for swimming on Lake Champlain. I won't go into this in depth, but I just want you to know that 17 of the beaches that sample regularly are included in this database for public beaches. And you can see the amount of blue that's on the chart doesn't really make you feel better if it's my section in Georgia shore and I've got people in from Rochester, New York, my niece and great niece who love to swim and all of a sudden they get there on a cyanobacteria bloom day. Fortunately this year we didn't have a single one. Last year we had one, but we're up at the north end of the Georgia shore or south end rather by Milton and we have less cyanone. So these are the beaches that are clearly monitored. I want to talk about the other reason why beaches sometimes close and that's due to coliform bacteria. So that can often come out of a wastewater treatment plan if something malfunctions or what we can call a combined sewer overflow. So some of you may have been in that industry, but sewer plants were originally designed for a set amount of people, a set amount of homes and industries coming in as the population continued to grow and engineering designs continued to change. Some municipalities joined their street runoff. So the water that was coming down the streets with their wastewater treatment plants thinking it would be an easier way to get that water treated out into the lake. Two weeks ago we had a two and a half inch rainstorm. It's too big for the systems to handle. That's when so much water as you can see on the right hand side goes right into the lake. Sometimes it's treated or partially treated and once in a while it's untreated. But there's real progress that's been made. You can see in the bottom middle in 1990 there were 87 combined sewer overflows in our watershed. In 2020 there were 31. It was an average cost of $2.1 million in recent years to fix each one. So again your tax dollars going to work, but it's at a significant cost. But the two states and the feds are picking away at those combined sewer overflows and often it's a municipal impact financially too because usually there's a local match. So 64% of those discharge points have been eliminated since 1990 and they don't really contribute a lot of phosphorus less than 1%. I think we're going to jump right in cyanobacteria blooms and we'll go to phosphorus. Have you all seen a cyanobacteria bloom? Okay so this is an aerial view looking down on a very small bay. You can see how it's drifted in near shore. That's what sometimes happens especially if you're in an area. Do you think about Lake Champlain? We have a southerly wind flow most of the time. So the water is being driven from the south to the north. Our two bays at the northern end of the lake, St. Almond's Bay goes this way, Mrs. Goy Bay goes this way. So they're getting that southern wind driving cyanobacteria in there and it's hard for that bacteria to be broken up by the waves and get back out in the main lake where it's not at such a high concentration. So what is cyanobacteria? We used to call it blue-green algae. So it's a very primitive form of bacteria as I understand it. It's like a collection of different types. It was one of the first oxygen giving organisms on earth. So it has been here since pretty much the earth began. It's all over the world. It's not just here. We only hear about it on the bad end of things when there's a cyanobacteria bloom. But in fact, it's been here for a very, very long time. Okay. So for cyanobacteria monitoring, we have high alerts. Now again, the light blue is the amount of good days for cyanobacteria. That means we're not seeing it up here in the water column. The average number of reports per year between 2013 and 2020, almost 1200 reports collected by local samplers per year. And you can see right at the top, a high alert is only about 2% of our beach days. Of those beach samples had high alerts, high enough levels to trigger this secondary stay out of the water, a sort of alert system. So we have two tiered system, low alerts and high alerts and high alerts. You need to get those kids and dogs and people out of the water. So low alerts, you might have a little bit of cyanobacteria bumping around in the water column, but it hasn't formed a scum on the surface, like we just saw in that photograph. So it might be okay. The deal is if the water's green, you need to stay out of it. That's what one of the big Quebec messages is now, if the water's green. The Quebec chair of the citizens advisory committee just met with us this week and he said that they actually had a much better season this year. What drives the cyanobacteria blooms? Does anyone know? Temperature, yeah. Water depth. So heat, sunlight, yeah. Anything that makes a plant grow on land is really helpful out there for cyanobacteria. Who would think that a lake that's 435 square miles in size would have those flat, calm days was so flat that that first foot or 18 inches of the water can heat up to 80 degrees. We got to 78 or 79 this year. We hit 80 last year. So that cyanobacteria loves that temperature too. So when you see those warm 90-degree days where the water is calm, that's when those blooms are most likely to occur. Just going into July 4th this year, we had a series of 90-degree days. It was like 90, 85, 89, right in a row. And my family was calling saying, oh, jeez, there goes July 4th. I'm like, no, we got a strong southerly wind in its flow and it's keeping that surface water moving. And we got away with July 4th being a great year for Lake Champlain communities because of it. Okay. I won't go into detail there, but just know that different segments of the lake because of the way maybe the depth of the water, or in this case, Mississippi and St. Albans getting that southerly drive of the wind in the water, they might have more high alert days than other parts of the lake. And in fact, in St. Albans Bay through 2020, I think 87% of the time the water was clear. About 13% was a high alert situation for cyanobacteria. Phosphorus, it's always a great yes. Is there a difference between our side of the lake and the New York side of the lake? Well, if you were to look at the landscape, there is a lot more agricultural land on the Vermont shoreline than there is in the New York shoreline. New York has more forests near the shoreline, keeping not necessarily the water cooler, but definitely the streams and rivers a little bit cooler. And historically, that's the way our landscape was settled. So more agriculture over here, more forestry over there. Oh, depending, yes, depending on where you are in the shoreline, the wave action can change a lot. Carmelin Bay is another great area of the lake in Plattsburgh driven by southern winds. Quebec gets a phone call from one of their friends, a lot of our Quebec friends, hey, south wind, let's all, you know, take our boards and go down there for windsurfing. Beautiful Bay. So different parts of the lake are impacted differently by the waves. Good point. Phosphorus. Phosphorus is a nutrients in every one of our bodies. It's in the cereal. You ate for breakfast. It's in the grass out in the lawn. It's in the soil. It's in the corn plants we're all consuming right now for last call for corn on the cob. But the problem is when it gets to the lake, it's driving algae to grow, not corn, not grass. It's creating algae. So anytime you see this is from the 2011 flood and it's down on the South Lake. It's either Otter Creek or the next one down. Anytime you see this sediment plume out in the lake where the brown water meets the clear water, you know it's loaded with nutrients because some forms of phosphorus, which help things grow, attach to soil particles and eventually that will sink to the bottom and those nutrients will then help the plants grow. That was a lot. So brown water, the Winooski was running really brown in that last big storm. Both of those streams coming over the Winooski bridge and you know that anytime it's brown, it's bringing sediment and nutrients to the lake. So what's the goal? Slow down that water, sink it, keep the sediment and the phosphorus on the land. Just quickly, you can read more about this on page 12 if you want. I always start with the middle donut there, land area. 73% of our watershed, if you were up in a plain, 73% is covered by forests. 18% is agricultural production. 4% is urban. Very deceiving because urban land, acre per acre, contributes significantly more phosphorus than agricultural land. So smaller percentage but acre per acre, a much bigger load. And if you think about it, if you think about just the cities on the hill, so let's think about the east side of Lake Champlain, St. Albans, City on a Hill, Burlington, some extent South Burlington, Middlebury, all cities on the hill. We're all packed in there tightly and we're all managing our landscapes very differently. You have a lot of impervious surfaces, paved areas where water is just running off. You've got lots of yards that are filled with grass rather than a lot of native vegetation. If that grass is too short, the water can run right off with nutrients in a big storm. So what we do on an urban landscape is very important also. But I will tell you that when I'm tabling at events, nobody ever comes up and says, those urban people, what do they say? Those darn farmers and I'm like, wait a minute, we pull out the book and we talk about it. It just happened again at the antique boat show. I thought we were over this. Having said that, there are portions of the landscape where agriculture is an issue. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state of Vermont on the Vermont shore work very closely with the conservation districts and the landowner to stop that pollution. So again, a lot of players in motion trying to work very hard. I don't really, I'm not the scientist. I will tell you that the load has to do with how much, well we'll read it, total amount delivered to the lake in a period of time, typically reported as a metric tons per year. So that's how much phosphorus comes into the lake on a yearly basis. Concentration is what's within a defined amount of water. So a little bit different. So I think of it as salt water. You have a sore throat. Your grandmother used to tell you, or my grandmother used to tell them in a gargle with salt water, very high concentration of salt in that tap water, not a very high concentration of salt. So this is as it relates to phosphorus. Some areas have a very high concentration. Like we saw that muddy discharge coming in, very high concentration. Okay, this is in here. Yeah, it says phosphorus. Again, anyone know which direction we're looking at? North to Jay Peak on the Mrs. Goy River. And the reason I happen to take this one, see on the right, that landscape, that field has been worn away. And that shoreline area has clearly been impacted. But then you also see areas where it's totally buffered in trees, which helps to hold the soil in place. I put this in here, not only because I love this scene when you're heading north, but because we have 11,700 miles of streams and rivers draining into this lake. So 11 over 11,000 miles. So when people call the resource room and say, when are you going to clean up the lake? It's like, wait a minute, it's not just come in and give the lake a pill. This is working with thousands and thousands of people upstream. And they're doing it. There are about 30 watershed groups that are very active in the Lake Champlain watershed, New York, Vermont, and Quebec. Each one of them, a lot of them have hundreds of volunteers, even if they only had 100. Right there is 3000 volunteers every year working on this lake. And then you've got the marinas, and you've got the angling groups, you've got trout unlimited, you have the municipalities and the conservation districts, and the conservation commissions. So if there's one thing that gets me fired up is when people tell me nobody's doing anything on behalf of this lake. So that's what I don't really like either. But what I really wanted to tell you is sometimes you hear about the total maximum daily load that TMDL, and it's when the state of Vermont and the state of well, and the federal government work on how much phosphorus is acceptable for Lake Champlain. So all I want you to know from this chart is see the difference. We have three lake sections, Main Lake, Cumberland Bay over in Plattsburgh and the Sisquoie Bay on the bottom. And there's that line, the dotted line that goes across it says we're on track. That means we're meeting the goal of this total maximum daily load, how much phosphorus we can put in. On the Main Lake you can see we're up in the red zone, at least two thirds of the time. Cumberland Bay, we're pretty good. We're above and below about 50% of the time. Sisquoie Bay, we're way up in the red zone and may never get to where we need to get. But can you see where 2010 is? And then 2011 follows, what happened in 2011? Tropical storm Irene, look at how much phosphorus came back into this lake through that two or three day event. Sometimes it was it was multiple years worth of phosphorus that got into the lake in two or three days. So there was a little backsliding on our progress and we've had to make up for it. Chloride levels going up a bit. And this is in here, it's on page 16. And I just want you to know that look at the trend over time. It had been 10, we're exceeding up to 15. Lake Champlain is a large lake. So in terms of our ecosystem, that amount of chloride hasn't impacted it a lot. But when you take a lake like a mirror lake up in Lake Placid, they're a real hot button for chloride levels. And that municipality and the volunteers are working around the clock to reduce it. And in a three year time frame, they've already seen a significant reduction in chloride. It's road salt, but it's also what we're doing on the landscape, what we're putting in front of stores, or in our driveways, or in our sidewalks. And we've got to have systems in place to keep that salt from running downstream. So last one for water quality. Here are my 3,000 people working on water quality issues along the whole watershed. Healthy ecosystems. How are we doing on time, Carol? Got about 10 more minutes. Okay, great. Healthy ecosystems. So let's fly. These are much more fun, less charity. A lot of turtles. We're really excited about Atlantic salmon progress. We're going to talk about the lake freeze over, non-native and invasive species of water chestnut. And besides, this kid is beautiful with a little frog on his arm. Landlock salmon. So these are salmon that historically might have spawned to the ocean. But they're in Champlain now and they really don't have a good way out. So they spawn up the streams and rivers in Champlain. I think with the lights, you can probably see it. So we've got the lake running up the middle. We've got a couple of areas highlighted. Can you see where there's a blue line, like by the Winooski River coming out of the lake, going to the Winooski? That's going up to the Winooski One Dam. The fish can get right up there easily. Let's jump down here over to Willsboro where you see the other blue line. Can you see that? So opened up, boom, because a dam was removed. So those fish can return to their natural spawning habitat. If we go up to Highgate Falls, I don't know if you've ever seen that big dam up there. But you can see the blue line coming out of Mrs. Boy Bay and then it's a red line. The red line means that it's inaccessible and historic range. So that means that's a section of the river that we can work on to remove smaller dams working with the landowners. Removing them will allow those salmon to go upstream further. So anytime there's red, it means that's a target for dam removal on Champlain. So you can see Plattsburgh by a Bill Wellman here from Trout Unlimited. He would say, get the darn dams out, Colleen. So the fish and wildlife folks at the citizen level are so committed to this lake and improving the fishery that it's just really incredible. They're all passionate just like you. They all had previous lives and previous jobs, but they're bringing their heart and soul to getting the dams out in the fish back. So that's a pretty cool story. It's one that we can have positive impact. Lake Service frees over. This is right out in front of our office up in Grand Isle. I love this. I don't know what it's technically called. I call it slab ice. So when the lake starts breaking up, sometimes due to ferry action, but this is a spring shock. Look at this. So it may not seem like a lot, but the upper chart is the June to September average temperature going up. That's the air temperature on the bottom. It's the average temperature December to March going up. So going up in both instances, temperature rise over time. Look at this. Ice freeze over. Blue is when it was frozen over. Red is when it did not freeze. Look at the difference between 1910 and 1950 compared to 1950 to 2020. So we're not freezing over nearly as much and that greatly impacts the ecosystem, the way the fish and other creatures move around the lake. The bays are normally still freezing. I think Burlington was really late to freeze this year, Burlington Harbor, but St. Albans, Missiscoe and some of the other sort of near shore bays froze pretty well. So this is changing and this is data that goes back to 1906. So I also just wanted to point this one out quickly. So if you look like about 1940, you go to the top of the chart, 20 year rolling percentage of freeze overs, we're somewhere about 85 to 90% of the time we're frozen over. Go to 2020, that next vertical line. So we're at about what, 25%. If you go out to 2020, it drops to between 15 and 18%. That's the projection that scientists have for Champlain. Basin species is my favorite slide. This is a community sailing center, sail. That was a lot. Basin program used a small grant, $7,500. Part of our messaging has to be spread the word, stop aquatic hitchhikers, clean drain and dry your boats. And so on the Burlington waterfront with hundreds of boats that are both transient and moored or docked there. In addition to all the people who come to the community sailing center to sail, the message was not about the basin program. There's no logo on that because everybody needs to use this phrase, stop aquatic hitchhikers. It was a $7,500 grant cost about $5,000 for the sail. $2,500 went to a local artist named Nikki Lazar. When she was a freshman in high school, she learned about zebra mussels and she saw our request for proposals go out and she said, I'm an artist. I'm going to get that. So, and she did. So there's Nikki, her first time ever in a sailboat right in the front with her mask on. But look at the number of invasive species that she's put into the sail. The bottom one right above the word aquatic. Yeah, well that one's it's tricky, Judy. It's a little bit hard to see from this distance. That's a quagga mussel. It's the cousin of the zebra mussel. It's not here yet as far as scientists know. Right above it is the zebra mussel. And the really the only way to tell them apart without a scientific microscope is that a zebra mussel has a flat side shaped like a D. So if you put it on the table, it would stand up on its shell. A quagga mussel has that little nook right at the top. If you put it on the table, it would fall right off. So that one's not here yet. Does anyone know what the circular areas are? Peter, I bet you do. Sea lamprey mouths. That's what those are. Looks beautiful. The mouth of a sea lamprey. We have Eurasian water mill foil in there. She's got the tinge coming down there. But if you're on the Burlington waterfront down by the sailing center, look for this. And that's the message. Stop aquatic hitchhikers. Just want you to know that over time, look at the number of species that have come in here. Our most recent is the fish hook water flea from 2018. So a couple of them, spiny water flea and the fish hook water flea. Guess who's the first one to say we've got them? Anglers, commercial anglers, we're calling saying our lines are all fouled up. And so this is what it looks like on the line. It looks like mashed up kiwi that's stuck to the fishing line. So that costs them a lot of time. Look what it's done to the line as they started to reel it in. So some of these species also have impacts on the health of native species. And that's why we're pretty concerned. ALY for one of the last fishes that came in, they create a thiamine deficiency. Judy's let me get by with either of those. Deficiency in Lake Trout. So it could impact their reproductive ability for the trout due to this deficiency. It made it change. It made the state of Vermont change the way they managed the hatchery and grand aisle to be able to treat those fish with, I think it was treating them with thiamine to make sure their eggs were more viable. So it's very interesting. The new guys on the block can really impact the old kids on the block when it comes to fisheries. So this is another favorite of mine. Shows Lake Champlain on the right. In the green box, it says we have 51 non-native species, aquatic species. Look at Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence box above it, 87 going down below Champlain to the Hudson River, 122 out here to the Great Lakes, 188. We're completely surrounded by waterways that have the ability to send invasive species to us. We share the same messaging with all of them. They don't want our species either. This is the new beast. It looks cute. It's almost like Nemo. This is a person's hand holding it up. It's a little tiny thing. It's the round goby and it has the potential to wreak total havoc on the bass fishery in Lake Champlain. And the scientists, when they were putting the word out this spring because it's growing closer and closer to us, showed videotape. So the round goby, like fish school, and when they are hungry, they might go after bass eggs. And in the spring time, I think it's around June, the male bass tends the nest and they showed us two different videos of the round goby going in and annoying the male bass. He came out to defend his nest and the other goby went in 15 and 17 seconds to clear those nests out of all their eggs. So when you hear this being discussed and you think of Lake Champlain as being in the top 10 bass fishery, you're darn right. We're really worried about the impacts of the round goby. Where are they right now? They are high up in the Richelieu River, high up, and they have some dams that they would have to come up through in order to get to Champlain. The DNA samples are showing that there is some DNA from the round goby lower than we would like in the Richelieu River, but they haven't found any of the fish themselves at this point in time, lower closer to Lake Champlain. So the DNA might have gotten there through feces of birds that then got deposited in the water. That DNA will track. Coming up from the south, however, they've gone through the Hudson. The Hudson estuary program is just very, very concerned about the impact of this fish on the Hudson and it's up to the confluence with the Mohawk River. We saw that leading out to the Great Lakes. So round goby, stay tuned. We don't want to stop the aquatic hitchhikers. And that is no easy task. We have 16 boat launch stewards working the Champlain side. We've got about 150 working the New York side. Those come out of Palsmouth College and they're literally on the boat launches, working on a voluntary basis. With those boat owners, can we check your boat? Can we give you two sound bites of information? Well, look at where these are the water bodies visited most commonly in the two weeks prior to coming to Champlain. Atlantic Ocean, St. Lawrence, we've got the Hudson, Saratoga. A lot of folks come up out of the Connecticut River. They have another type of plant that we definitely don't want. If you think millfoil is a problem, this one can infest us faster than millfoil ever even knew about. So looking at a bigger regional perspective, we got to be on the lookout. There's one of our boat stewards checking out a jet ski with a clean drain dry shirt on. Sea lamprey, another very interesting character. A lot, millions and millions of dollars have been spent on the by the US Fish and Wildlife Service working with local groups trying to keep lamprey populations down. Yes, Peter? I believe we're on a regular schedule. We have to be careful. In Canada, they don't put pesticides in their water. So we've gone to alternative treatments. US Fish and Wildlife actually helped Canada build a barrier dam so that it was a nonchemical treatment. But the fishermen in the US wanted the lamprey stopped and that was a great partnership, cross border relationship. But you can see I'm not completely up to speed on TFM versus others. We've got our wine down here. But Atlantic salmon and lake trout, Atlantic salmon, we've made more progress on. And just lastly, I want to leave you with the water chestnut, another very strong invasive species in Champlain. But we've made great progress. See the red area, 1999, the South Lake. Look at 2020, very small red area. A lot of federal money and a lot of local volunteers have have helped take care of the water chestnut and beat it backwards. Unfortunately, last week, even though Mrs. Guaiba is all blue, we just found a significant area up there. There's an emergency team that will go out and pull that will be about 50 people strong. Carol, I think you're coming back up. This one's nice and messy. I love putting this in there. Look at these volunteers, part of my 3,000 people. But these are state and nature conservancy and summer camp volunteers. Look at how muddy they are. And they're out in the wetlands trying to pull the water chestnuts. So a lot of work. There's a lot more in this document for you to take a look at. We go into thriving communities, a couple other invasive species and what you can do in your local community. It's called dive in. Great. Thank you so much. This is so interesting. What a treasure. Lake Champlain and you are treasures. Do we have any Zoom questions? I have two questions. This person has a beach house at Crescent Beach near Luddie. And she says, is it possible to control the algae blooms better in Lake Champlain? We were not able to swim at our beach several times during the summer because of the blooms. It seems like the problem is getting worse every year. Okay. So did everyone hear that? We control the algae blooms. She has a place near Luddie. So we can't control them per se. What we need to continue to do is reduce the amount of nutrients that are feeding these algae blooms. That's a long-term issue. The other thing that needs to be done is we need to slow the warming of this waterway. So as a kid, we never saw 80 degrees in this lake. I guarantee that. So the amount of temperature change in this lake is also having an impact. So unfortunately, can we stop it? No. What we can try to do is slow it and reverse it over time. And putting and investing that money into phosphorus reduction is critical. And that's still really the number one priority for the basin program in the two states and the province to get the phosphorus numbers down. And as Peter would tell you and Judy would tell you, it's a very frustrating process. It's slow, slow. Any questions from the audience here? Is there any program locally either around Burlington, South Burlington or anywhere along the lake with sale and use of either herbicides or nutrients that you could use like fertilizers that you could say you shouldn't use these within a certain distance of the lake or at any time period, especially during a wet season? Do you have any programs to specifically target that? Yes, we have been involved in two. One is called, believe it or not, who's created don't pee on your lawn with a capital P for phosphorus. And that was six different institutions banding together with a little bit of money to help the state of Vermont and the state of New York who at the time wanted the legislation change. But we used our networks to help get that message out that a typical lawn does not need more phosphorus in the fertilizer. That grass tends to need nitrogen more so than phosphorus with the exception of if you're just starting a lawn, you need some of both. So we developed a program, Burbage PowerPoint, took it on the road, Lake George Association called us and said, love the stuff. Can we help? Can you get us on there? Yes. So we're reprinting, we put them on. I mean, these are your EPA dollars. If you got a program that's working, you sell it for free. You give it away and say, run with it. Indiana and Illinois Sea Grant took our program, ran with it, built up a big staff to address it out in that portion. So don't pee on your lawn. New York State beat Vermont in terms of getting phosphorus free legislation for fertilizer. So that was a win-win situation. The other question pertained to herbicide. Not my area of expertise because I'm not the scientist, but I don't believe any herbicides are allowed in Lake Champlain. They are used heavily permitted, run by the state of Vermont, for some of the inland lakes and inland issues. But on Champlain, you're not supposed to be using herbicides in the water. And you've got to watch out for what you're putting in the stream banks too, or Lakeshore, which could then lead right into Lake Champlain. So we now, that don't pee on your lawn is turned into raise the blade. That's our next phase. Three inches or higher, if you live in a condominium association that has a management group mowing the lawn, if they're not at three inches, ask them why. And the goal is the higher the grass blade, the deeper the root zone, it can store that water better. If you leave the clippings on the lawn even better, because it creates an organic matter that can help make that top layer a little spongier, and that will absorb that runoff even more. And think back to that storm at two and a half inches, two weeks ago, our lawns, if we have to have them, and I do at camp, I fight my brother in law all the time, he wins because he's the mower. But I try to call him back and say keep that grass higher. So during the month of August, it was up to three inches. And it helps in time to drought too. Yep. Well, we have been working Lake Champlain Sea Grant as one of our partners, and they've been, they've been really working at the municipal and private sector level. We've got quite a few partners. I would say if you're in a condo association, just approach management and ask them. And when they see the science behind it, and this is all supported by research at Cornell University and out in the Midwest too. But a lot of people are amenable to making the change if they realize the impact they can potentially have. Okay. Now a zoom question. One more. I recently heard about another pollutant styrene that resulted in the closing of Letty Beach this week. Could you explain this new threat? That's where I am not the scientist. I did read an article in the Burlington Free Press. I think it was in the Free Press. It was an online resource that talked about it being a carcinogen. So I don't really have the details. It was a terrible incident for Letty Park. But it seems as though the state came out pretty strongly in their choice of wording and what they felt the impacts would be both the state and local levels. So all I can do in that case is defer back to what I read in the media. So let's just hope it doesn't happen again. Mistakes do happen, unfortunately, and they can be costly. I'm glad they posted. Yes. When I'm driving around along the road sides, I see these blue round signs with a W. And I know that means watershed. And is am I right that anytime you see those blue signs, that particular stream is going into the lake? Is that with that the whole meaning of that? Well, I'm not quite sure which signs you're seeing. I thought you were going in a different direction. There's a project called Blue. They're short signs. That is a project that's run in partnership with Lake Champlain Sea Grant. And there are about six or seven different programs like that out in Lewinowski in the Osable. But the goal is, for a homeowner in that case, to think about how the water is running off their land. Can they put up a rain gutter that would lead to a rain barrel that would drain into either a rain garden or out on the lawn instead of down your driveway? So you can go through a homeowner certification program through the blue program and get a yard sign. And other places, I know the ones up north in St. Albans, they have taller signs that are near the roads, marking the subwaterships. So the Winnowski might have, I can't even think right now, the Mad River comes down into the Winnowski or some of the other branches. There are a whole bunch of them that all come down into the main stem of the Winnowski. And sometimes local watershed groups want you to know when you're going neighborhood to neighborhood, which way your water is draining. And I think they have it down by Englesby Brook and places like that as well. So those would be my two options on the blue sign. Has anybody found a commercial use for water chest nuts, grinding them up, or the algae bloom? Interesting question. So water chest nuts down in the South Lake are posed up on agricultural land. Several farmers have agreed to host compost sites. So what happens is the volunteers get it to a certain site. They're picked up in a dump truck. They're brought to the farmers who have agreed to it. So they would do that except that seed pod that I showed you is very nasty. It will come through a dog foot. So you think about the duck hunters intercepting water chest nuts. This is a bad thing for their dogs if they're using dogs to hunt. But water chest, I haven't heard of it being ground down into fertilizer or anything, but clearly a farmer would not probably put this material on a pasture where there were animals that could be impacted by that. However, he might be able to use it for fertilizer, he or she, by the time it decays. In St. Albans, they also gather the Eurasian water millfoil with a harvester, bring it to the shoreline, and farmers have stepped up to help compost that as well. So not commercially sold, but locally used. And every time those plants come out, so does the phosphorus. So get them out of there. Yes, sir. I'd like to make a comment. I'm familiar with the, it's called acceptable management practices on longing jobs in Vermont. Right. I worked in that area. What I'm proud of, I think we should be proud of, it was done the Vermont way. It was a collaborative effort. We had the loggers, foresters, then soil conservation service in the wildlife folks. We're all there, and I'm pretty, we came up with, the whole idea was come up with very practical solutions that everyone bought into. And the only common, and of course, issues we identified with forest shade sediment. Yeah. The one we saw left, left that was that it was okay for trees to fall in the brooks. Mater trees, that's the rule, right. So thank you for that. So we're going to end with one more Zoom question. Okay. Are there any measurements of toxic chemicals emanating from boats that you are worried about? Emanating from boats, not that I'm aware of. Back in the 90s, we did a pretty thorough test working with EPA in the two states on chemicals that were coming out of any industry. Anyone that had a discharge to Lake Champlain, and they all met the EPA requirements at the time. There was one small area that had an agricultural chemical introduced, and the scientists worked upstream, found the source, stopped it, and the farmer didn't even know it was leaching from his land at the time. Colleen, thank you so, so much. This was great. I should also tell you that Judy Allard was one of the ECHO volunteers. And if you have time, we can always use a shoot. Those ladies can help you learn everything.