- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab,
I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here at the
UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension
and on behalf of those folks and
our other core organizers, Wisconsin Public Television,
the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks, again, for coming to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Eric Olson.
He's with UW-Extension Lakes
and he partners with UW-Stevens Point,
which is where he's located.
He was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota,
got his undergraduate degree
in Natural Resources at the St. Paul campus
of the University of Minnesota,
and then he came here to get
his advanced degrees in Urban Planning.
In 2004, he joined UW-Extension Cooperative Extension
and in 2011, you took your current job with the Lakes folks.
This is a big deal for Wisconsin and how we view
and treat our lakes,
and how much of that is private property,
and how much of that public domain,
and how all that inter-plays.
It's been a point of discussion
at least since our constitution in 1848.
It's going to be very interesting to hear
what the science has to say about
how we do all these very interesting
community-based natural resource management projects
in protecting our lakes of Wisconsin.
Please join me in welcoming Eric Olson
to Wednesday Night @ The Lab.
(applause)
- Thanks, Tom.
Thanks, Tom, and thanks everybody for
coming out on a brisk, cool Wednesday evening.
Again, I'm Eric Olson.
I do work for UW-Extension.
Part of what you're gonna see here is really
sort of a tour of one little wing of UW-Extension.
And I like this particular wing,
not just because I work there,
but because I really think it embodies
this concept of the Wisconsin Idea.
You're gonna hear some things
just sort of in this review of about
40-50 years of history
that should ring true if you know some things
about the Wisconsin Idea
and the relationship between UW and the grand
population of the state of Wisconsin.
Also in, sort of the idea of thanking people up front,
I do want to recognize
the people that kind of work
along with me and that support me.
These folks, most of them work in Stevens Point.
They're all UW-Extension employees.
A couple of them actually work
out of an office in the DNR's regional
headquarters up in Rhinelander.
But these are my people
who I work with.
We are outreach specialists,
which basically means we do things like this.
We go around the state and we
give people explanatory talks about different topics.
In our case, lakes and natural resources.
We have a couple of programs I'm gonna talk about.
One of them is this AIS Aquatic Invasive Species.
Erin McFarlane, in the upper right corner there,
she's our volunteer coordinator for
Aquatic Invasive Species.
Also, something called Citizen Lake Monitoring Network,
Paul Skawinski is our most recent
hire into our office,
and he coordinates a state-wide program to monitor
lake water quality.
And then we have a tremendous support staff, as well.
People who keep our web page operating
and keep our communications vibrant.
If that's the cast,
you know, for me and UW-Extension,
this represents pretty much our setting.
It's the lakes of Wisconsin.
They're beautiful,
most people in the state have some sort of personal story
that they can relate to a lake.
Whether it's the lakes here in Dane County,
or maybe it's the Great Lakes,
they grew up in Milwaukee,
or maybe it's a lake up north,
a place where they had a cabin.
But this is sort of the setting for our work.
And what I'm gonna do is kind of unravel this tale
of how a partnership has evolved
between citizens, property owners,
lakeshore property owners, cabins and homeowners,
as well as the Department of Natural Resources
and its programs to deal with lake and water quality,
and then the University as another part of that partnership.
In terms of that setting,
you all hopefully have some understanding
that there's about
by some measures, there's about 16,000 lakes
in the state of Wisconsin.
The majority of those, more than half of them,
are very small lakes,
they'd be the size of this room, maybe, or smaller.
So we don't typically think of those as
the kind of lakes we know about
and instead there's about 6,000 lakes that are
probably the kind you would come across
and recognize and say
"Ah, there's one of Wisconsin's many thousand lakes."
Our lakes are a big driver for tourism.
As long ago as a hundred years ago,
trains of people were coming up
from the Chicago region and from the Twin Cities
to go up north, to get away from it all,
to go fishing, to relax basically.
And even today, you know, it kind of boggles the mind
to of the many thousands of people
who work maybe a factory job or an office job
and they're basically banking up their vacation time,
they're saving money, they're putting it into account
so that they can take that time and take that money
and go into northern Wisconsin and relax.
And so there we're talking millions
if not hundreds of millions of dollars
every year of tourism dollars coming in.
There's also a real estate value of these lakes.
Most lakeshore property,
if anyone's ever been in the marketplace
for trying to buy lakeshore property,
it's priced by the linear foot.
How many feet of shoreline do you have?
And then the price per foot
right now is typically right around $1,000.
It can go higher than that on certain lakes,
it can certainly go lower on lakes that are less desirable,
but $1000 is a pretty good estimate.
If you multiply that out across some of the shoreline,
maybe you'd come up with a number
around a hundred billion dollars
just of real estate value for shoreland land.
For people in Wisconsin,
these lakes are a piece of quality of life.
Everybody has, I think, an opportunity
to get to a lake, hopefully go out and recreate in a lake.
We have about 550 public beaches in the state,
where people can just go without paying a fee
and get into a lake and go swimming.
A lot of people take their kids to those beaches.
It also just helps people, I think, to relax.
Just knowing that they can go sit by a lake
it really does improve, I think, the quality of life.
And then another big factor that maybe
most people don't think about is just the ecology.
The plants and animals of Wisconsin
just would not be the same
if it weren't for its wet nature,
if it weren't for all these lakes and rivers.
So it's important to keep these things in mind
as we're thinking about why do we get involved in lakes.
So, again, people like to have fun in lakes.
People like to recreate, as well as I think relax.
You know, this looks like pretty
pretty nice calming scene here,
doing his fishing at sunset.
Again, that ecology, you know.
We wouldn't have loons in Wisconsin
if we didn't have these lakes.
And in fact, the loons require a very certain type of lake.
And so we have to be careful in how we manage these lakes.
Another part of that setting
in my mind, is really the social setting.
That there's groups of people out there
those property owners, as individuals,
but also, they've gotten together
to form organizations, to form groups.
Initially these were just non-profit associations.
The first lake associations were forming
over 100 years ago in southeast Wisconsin.
And people would kind of get together
and informally come up with maybe ideas
for how they could protect their lake
and try to be involved in how the lake was gonna be managed.
But we knew that there's basically,
as long ago as 40-50 years ago,
we knew that there were many of these
organizations out there
we weren't sure sort of what they were up to.
We also have things called lake districts in Wisconsin.
And this isn't just a description of a geological region
or geographical region,
a lake district is actually a local unit of government.
It's a formally created local unit of government
that actually has the ability
to raise money through a property tax.
And I'll talk a bit about how those came into being.
But we have currently over 200 of those.
There's also may groups that are organizing
at the county scale to deal with a whole
set of issues that might encompass
all the lakes and rivers in a county.
And then this last bullet here,
I just point out that this,
this situation, where we have these lakes
that are basically owned by everybody,
but not really.
It's too much of a job, really,
to ask the Department of Natural Resources
to take care of 6,000-16,000 lakes.
They just could never do it.
We could never,
the taxpayers could never afford to hire
all the resource managers needed
to take care of these lakes.
But we have these local people, and we wonder,
at least some researchers were wondering in the 1960s,
could we leverage those people?
Could we leverage these institutions to be our partners?
And part of what we would need to do
this classic extension in these bullets
is related to
we would need to reach out,
we need to develop an educational program
to make sure people understand
the lake problems that they're facing.
We'd also maybe need to help them
develop their organizations.
If they're just an informal group of buddies
who get together and complain about fishing,
how can we move them along an organizational continuum
to maybe being problem solvers
and people who can be part of the solution?
And then, leadership development
is something that Extension does statewide, as well.
Recognize that there's people out there
who are passionate and sincere about addressing an issue,
but they need maybe a little bit of assistance
and a little bit of guidance
to help get them on the path to addressing those problems
in an efficient way, and really carrying out
what they feel is kind of bugging them.
And in the case of lake people,
there's plenty of people who have
concerns and issues about their lakes.
So now we'll get into sort of the thick of the plot.
I've already hinted at these Lake Organizations.
I think they're
sort of the part that makes all
this exciting and interesting.
This research that took place in the 1960s and 70s,
involved this character, Lowell Klessig.
He got his PhD here at UW-Madison.
He studied under Steve Born,
some of you might have heard of Steve Born,
he was an important person in water resource management
in the state for many decades.
Lowell's research project under Steve
was basically to go around to
lake association meetings
in the late 1960s and early 1970s
and just observe what exactly they're up to,
try and learn from them in terms of what their issues are
and what their problems are,
and then to also do a survey.
He did a survey of all these
lake organizations to find out
what role could they possibly play
in a more coherent and focused
lake management program in the state.
And you can kind of see his results here.
He just said these property owners
are really the only group that have that
personal interest and really the proximity,
they're right on the lake,
to get involved in managing individual lakes.
His concern at the time was that
as just voluntary groups,
they weren't always respected by, say, town government,
or county government,
or certainly by state government.
And they also lacked financial means.
They were reliant on simply dues
or donations and fundraisers,
so they always found themselves
basically spending their time
trying to raise money instead of
taking care of the issues
that they wanted to take care of.
The classic Wisconsin Idea part of this story
is really what happened after Lowell and Steve
and their other fellow researchers
published their results.
Lawmakers worked with
faculty at UW-Madison in the law school
and said how do we address this?
What could we do?
And they said well we can actually
create a chapter and statutes
that allows these lake organizations
to form these lake districts.
And then these lake districts
could be formal partners with the Wisconsin DNR.
You could create a funding program
that essentially relies on
the lake districts to raise roughly
half the money needed
to take care of a lake project,
and then the DNR would bring the other half.
And the DNR would also bring
some expertise to the table.
But in this way, we would essentially be partners.
We wouldn't rely just on the state
to solve the problem, and we wouldn't rely just on
the local property owners to solve the problem.
The statute was adopted within a year
of its introduction,
and then lo and behold we had a brand new
Wisconsin Lakes Management program.
And that classic extension need came back again.
Okay, if we're gonna start propagating
new little units of government around the state,
someone needs to kind of explain to them
what the rules of the road are,
and how to interpret Chapter 33,
which is the lake district part of the statutes.
Chapter 33, you know, most people might be able to read it
and it would be obvious to them what
what the statute means
but it would really help to have someone
answer questions and help interpret it.
And Lowell was then hired, actually,
as the first statewide Extension Lake Specialist.
So his research translated directly into law,
which then translated directly into
an outreach program for UW-Extension
to partner with these lake associations.
And he was uniquely situated
because his research actually got him to be familiar
with hundreds and hundreds of different groups,
and many hundreds of individuals around the state.
So, I owe a great debt of gratitude
to Lowell for getting this all started.
This is kind of where we're at today
as far as these organizations.
You may not be able to see this in the back.
The blue counties are differentiated
from the green in that they have
a county-wide organization.
So in addition to having small
lake associations or lake districts,
there's a group that gets together
at the county scale to try to
address county scale problems and issues.
And then the numbers in here indicate
what portion of the lakes larger than 20 acres
have a lake association.
So if we go to one of our most
lake-rich counties is Vilas County
in extreme north central Wisconsin.
There's 426 of these relatively large lakes,
and out of them, 84, or roughly 20%
have an organization that's formed now
to help co-manage those lakes.
Down in the southeast part of the state,
we actually see I think a much more
saturation of organizations.
Waukesha County, which has 49 of these
larger lakes, has 40 such organizations.
Washington County, it's 16 out of 18.
So in many places in the state,
basically every lake has something
either a lake association or a lake district
helping to address the issues.
One of the things that Lowell recognized
in the early 1970s is that he needed
to have a communications vehicle
to keep up with all these folks,
and to explain to them
what's going on with Chapter 33,
and if there's gonna be changes in the statute.
What's going on with their
fellow lake districts,
these new organizations
forming around the state.
And so he settled on the idea
of a quarterly newsletter that could be
distributed to a mailing list
that he would develop.
And so this is a copy, just a scanned version of
Lowell's very first Lake Tides Newsletter,
published in the early 1970s.
And so you can see it was sort of
the old fashioned typeset stuff,
you can see the UW-Extension logo on there,
and it's a newsletter for people who are
interested in Wisconsin's inland lakes.
For the people in the room,
I brought copies of the newsletter.
Some of you already have them.
And you can find this online.
Our current newsletter looks
not dramatically different
from what it started as,
but we're essentially now in the 40th year
of producing this newsletter on a quarterly basis
and distributing it around the state.
Our physical, hard copy mailing list
is about 22,000 addresses,
both in Wisconsin and outside of Wisconsin.
And then we have thousands of people
who have signed up to get it electronically.
They get a email that links to a PDF.
And we just continue to use this as our main
communication vehicle to try to keep people
up to speed with what's going on in lakes
and to try to continue doing that classic
extension challenge of ensuring that people
are educated on some of the basics of lake ecology.
Lowell spent a lot of his time in the 70s
driving all around the state of Wisconsin
meeting up with people.
He was pretty involved in just driving
from one meeting to the other.
He spent a lot of his time on the road.
And then he'd have sort of regional meetings
where he'd try to explain to people
again in person what Chapter 33 was all about
and why they might wanna form a lake district.
Starting in the late 1970s, he realized,
and the people he was working with told him,
you know what, we should do just one big gathering.
One big statewide get-together.
Instead of all these little gatherings
around the state, why don't we throw
a conference.
So in 1979, they organized the first
statewide conference for lake people
as well as the DNR and UW folks
to get together.
This is just a cover
of our recent agenda for the 2015 conference.
We're right now in the production part
of putting together the 2016 conference.
For the folks in the room, I have a little card
that kind of gives you the web page
and how you can find out more
about our conference.
It's pretty involved.
We typically have between 60-100 different
presenters over the course of three days.
Packed all in to one conference center.
The number up there
this chart up in the upper right corner
is just showing how many people register each year.
So people in the back may not be able to see.
We typically get between 450 and 550 people
coming to the statewide conference
once every year.
We also recognized later on
this need for leadership development.
Lowell Klessig was also involved
in the creation of Wisconsin's
Rural Leadership Program,
which has evolved now into what's called
just Leadership Wisconsin.
And he took some of these same concepts
of trying to challenge individuals
to expand their horizons,
understanding, I think,
the policy aspects of lake management,
the science aspects of lake management,
and basically distill this into a course
that we call Lake Leaders.
We offer this every other year.
We recruit people around the state.
We take nominations from people,
if they know of a neighbor or someone else
who maybe could benefit from a
leadership course like this.
We gather all their names,
we ask them then to apply,
to formally apply and put down a deposit
and join us in Lake Leaders.
We have three different
sessions that we go through with them.
The first session is really
about exploring, maybe, personality styles
and problem-solving skills.
How you deal with conflict in
situations where maybe people
don't agree on what the definition
of the problem, itself, is.
So that's our first session.
Our second session takes place up at Kemp Station,
which is a UW-Madison research station
up in northern Wisconsin.
It has a boathouse that's actually
built right on top of the lake.
We get to use that as a classroom
and then go out on the lake
and do some learning about lake science
and what does the DNR and the University
do to better understand lake issues.
And then we have a culminating session in the Fall.
Held usually outside of Baraboo.
We have a graduation ceremony
that takes place at the Shack of the Leopold Center.
And we basically finish by talking
a lot about policy implementation, legal aspects,
and constitutional aspects of lake management.
So then we have a core of people
who can go out and work in their own community
and work with their lake organizations
and hopefully try to keep
advancing them forward and solving problems.
So just this year, we're recruiting
our 11th leadership crew.
We had 69 nominations from around the state.
We can only fit about 25 people in the boathouse.
So we have to kind of somehow winnow
that down into the size of crew
that's gonna go through this program.
We kind of follow up with people
It's hard to know unless you can follow
each person's story after they graduate
and see what they're up to.
And we do that in some cases.
But we do survey people just to ask
did this training actually help push you further?
Did you become more involved
in lake management and leadership?
The vast majority of people, or 70% roughly, say yes.
There's just a small set of people,
less than 10%, who say no.
And then there's some people who are still maybe ambivalent.
We try to do these surveys on a regular basis
just to gauge what direction we need to go
with the leadership program.
Some other things changed over time.
There was a crisis, actually.
Some people in this room might remember
what it was like in the state of Wisconsin
in the early 1980s.
I don't, I grew up in Minnesota,
so I was just a kid waiting for the next Star Wars movie.
But in the early 1980s,
the economy took a bit of a nosedive.
There was oil inflation
and a broad recession taking place as well as other,
like interest rates were crazy high.
The state of Wisconsin was kind of
struggling to balance its books,
which is probably a story you're used to hearing now.
And they decided that this lake program
in the early 1980s
that it really wasn't worth it.
They looked at the money that was being spent
in that partnership I was talking about
between the lake districts and the state of Wisconsin,
and when they audited it and kinda looked at
how the money was spent,
they found that a great amount of it
was being spent on dredging projects.
That small lakes that were basically
impounded streams in small villages,
these would be like your typical
millstream type situation, you know.
150 years ago someone built a dam there
to power a little flour mill or a saw mill.
There's been a lake in this village for a long time
and people were upset that this lake has filled in
with plants and sediment.
And so they said well this is great.
Now the DNR's gonna give us
half the money we need to dredge this lake out.
The audit looked at that and said, you know what,
if you haven't figured out where the sediment, itself,
is coming from.
If you haven't solved the problems upstream
in the watershed, just by dredging,
you've subscribed yourself to a long-term expensive
dredging maintenance project.
That's all you're gonna do.
And if we look at all the different
little millponds around the state,
if this is the type of project we're gonna propagate,
we can't afford that.
That's ridiculous, it's not a good use of money.
And when that audit came to the governor,
he said, you know what, let's nix this program.
Those were sort of dark days for the lakes partnership,
but they didn't give up.
By that point, Lowell and all the other individuals
in the lake associations had started some momentum
about lake issues.
And they weren't gonna let just this budget deletion
stop them.
They retrenched.
The annual convention kept going on.
In fact, it got bigger.
They started to tap into some political powers.
They started to invite
the governor and other people
to come to that annual conference
and talk about what really are the issues
facing our lakes.
And within a few years,
just a couple years later,
they essentially unveiled a
new and reborn Lakes Program
that funded, again, many people.
Staffed people in the DNR to work on lake issues,
it funded the grant program to work with groups,
and it also funded this idea of the
Citizen Lake Monitoring Network.
We can now fund equipment going out across the state,
being entrusted to individual volunteers
who would then go out and make recordings
of lake water quality.
Another thing people might remember about the 80s
was Ronald Reagan was our president.
And part of Ronald Reagan's appeal to many people
was that he pointed out that sometimes
government needs to get out of the way
and allow people to be part of the solution.
Maybe we need to instill more voluntary participation
in solving problems that we used to
just rely on government to do.
And working with volunteers fit perfectly into that.
It was sort of, captured the spirit of the day
and said yes, let's go out
and train volunteers and leverage them.
Because it's true, we won't have enough
Wisconsin DNR staff people
to even just go out and take all these
measurements of lake water quality.
So that program started roughly in 1986.
This is just showing you how many
volunteers were involved in the program.
You can see a pretty linear growth
occurring between 1986 and roughly 2012.
Going from less than 200 volunteers
to now, we're roughly kind of stabilizing
out at about 1,000 volunteers.
And if you were to figure out sort of
if you just looked up the amount of
time they spend doing this activity,
and calculate a dollar value,
this represents about $344,000 just in staff time.
And that doesn't take into account
that they're using their own boat,
and that they live on the lake.
And so the researchers don't have to go out to each lake,
these volunteers are right there.
This data that's now accruing
both in Wisconsin and other states,
is useful for researchers like Noah Lottig,
here at UW-Madison at the Center for Limnology,
where he's taking a look at now
many, many tens of thousands of observations
of lake water quality and trying to find out
well, do we see trends now?
Can we really discern that
are lakes in Wisconsin getting any better?
Or are they getting worse?
Based on all this data that's been put together.
And this chart really just shows
if you're looking at this map,
you can see the blue is basically
where all the water bodies are.
And then you start covering them up
based on the water body,
how many years worth of data do we have?
Where the biggest red circles represent
somewhere between 11 and 34 years of data.
And then the small dots,
the black dots and the yellow dots
are somewhere between one and six.
Wisconsin stands out here.
Because we've been doing this
longer and more intensively
than any of our neighboring states.
And it gives us, I think, a better handle on
what's going on with water quality in our lakes.
Another thing that happens
when you train people to sort of be citizen scientists,
to be good keen observers out on the resource,
is that we can also work with them
to identify plants.
They can identify plants that belong in a lake,
and maybe plants that don't belong in a lake.
This is an example of a plant
that doesn't belong in a lake.
I don't imagine anybody in here
could recognize what we're looking at.
This is the starry stonewort.
So you can kinda get a sense of where
the name starry stonewort comes from
in the sense that this piece of the plant
looks somewhat like a star.
You can see someone's fingerprint pattern
behind it to give you a sense of how small this is.
This is called a bulbil.
The starry stonewort is actually an algae.
It's a very simple plant.
It's an algae that could reproduce sexually
if there were males and females in Wisconsin.
Or in the United States.
Or in North America.
There's not.
These guys came over on ballast water
from Europe.
And fortunately for us,
only the males have made it so far.
What that means is that this can only
reproduce asexually.
Usually it propagates through these bulbils
that can store energy and then
kinda persist for a little while,
and then start producing more growth.
Or if, just the plant itself,
the algae fragments break up,
it can reproduce from that again.
However, if you can find these pieces,
if you can be careful about moving these pieces,
you can actually prevent this plant
from moving from one water body to another.
It does not move by ducks.
It does not move by fish.
It moves by human transmittal
through boats and other careless activity.
We're fortunate that it's not sexual
because if two algae were to get together
and produce offspring,
the resulting offspring would actually
be so small that there's no way
that we could prevent its spread.
Because it's asexual,
because it can only spread
by fragments or these bulbils,
we can actually catch it.
And it was Citizen Monitors
who were able to help detect
this out of place plant in southeast Wisconsin
just starting two years ago.
Now we've identified several lakes
in southeast Wisconsin that do have
starry stonewort.
Just last year they found a couple of lakes
in Minnesota that have the same plant
and again, it's clear that it's moving
by boat traffic.
So, what do we do about that?
It was right around
2003
when some folks up in northern Wisconsin said,
"You know what?
"We're note gonna just sit back
"and watch people come with their boats
"and maybe they got plants hanging off their boat
"and they're just gonna put it in the lake.
"Instead, we wanna be at the landing
"and we wanna talk to them about
"good boat sanitation practices
"and what part boater can play
"in preventing the spread of invasive aquatic plants
and other species from one water body to another."
This is a neat story, because it actually
just came out of some high schoolers.
Some kids up in northern Wisconsin,
they had a good science teacher,
and the science teacher inspired in them
to apply for a grant.
They applied for a grant that was
from a foundation in Washington DC.
They said what we want to do is we want to
provide a kit that any lake organization
could use at their landing.
It would have T-shirts that would identify the volunteers,
it would have informational packets
they could hand out to boaters,
and we wanna just propagate this idea,
spread around a bunch of volunteers
standing at boat landings.
And then we, the DNR and UW-Extension
and the lake organizations agreed
we'd formally create this program called
Clean Boats, Clean Waters.
Which is a volunteer boat landing monitoring program
to try to prevent the spread of invasive species.
This data just takes us up to 2014,
we actually just finished getting
some of the 2015 data together.
What this is showing, is how many boats
have been inspected in Wisconsin
from 2004 through 2014.
You can see that in the very first year
that this formal program came out,
only 6,000 boats.
Well, we only had a couple of landings,
we only had so many volunteers.
But you can see, again, some pretty
dramatic growth up until 2012.
People are very concerned about
aquatic invasive species,
Eurasian watermilfoil, and zebra mussels,
and they wanna do something
to try to prevent its spread.
And this is basically one of the tools
that's available for them
to try to prevent infestations,
new infestations coming into their lakes.
And again, there's just a quantification
a rough quantification of the
volunteer effort here.
I don't think it represents, really,
all the value that the volunteers add.
By meeting with recreational boaters
at the landing and talking to them.
We've actually seen over the same period of time,
I'm learning that it's very difficult
to really measure these things
and to say that you're having an impact.
However the rate at which new lakes
become infested with aquatic invasive species
has slowed in Wisconsin.
We aren't seeing the same rate
that we saw in the 1990s
and the early part of 2000s.
Now, again, it's hard to tease out
well is that because all the
easily infected lakes are now infected?
Or is it because of efforts like this?
Is it because of heightened awareness?
It's a little bit difficult to say,
but we're pleased that the rate has slowed down.
We've also been,
All of these volunteers and all these people
learning about invasive species
has really put the pressure on
both the state and federal government
to be much more careful about
how ballast water is coming into the Great Lakes.
Everyone kind of identified that
that's really the big open door
that's allowing new species from
other parts of the planet to come into the Great Lakes.
And so we haven't had a new species
found in the Great Lakes
for several years now.
And it's because they've implemented some rules.
The most basic one saying that
when an ocean-going vessel is out at sea,
it needs to swap out fresh water for saltwater.
And usually at that point,
all the freshwater species are lost
and then as it comes into a freshwater area,
it swaps out again, but now it's in
a whole different part of the world,
so we don't see the same movement of species
that we used to see.
This next part is sort of like
well, where if this is,
what I've given you is where the
Lakes Partnership has been and where it came from.
And now we're starting to ask ourselves
both the DNR, UW-Extension,
and a lot of our stakeholders,
these lake organizations and property owners,
what's next?
We've done really good
assessments of lake health.
Lake water quality and habitat in lakes.
The EPA generously funds this type of research
and says here's some money, hire some people,
go out and just measure just how good your lakes are doing.
Because the EPA is interested in
How does Wisconsin compare to Minnesota,
How does Minnesota compare to Montana,
Can we look at sort of all these states
and get a state-by-state comparison?
Wisconsin is doing pretty good.
We have some of the healthiest lakes,
but they're not perfect.
And when this assessment is done,
we find two big issues.
One of them is in-lake habitat.
The pieces of habitat within a lake
that we know existed 150 or 200 years ago
that are now completely gone.
Two big pieces of that are basically
coarse woody debris, or trees, that have fallen into a lake
and the other one just being aquatic plants.
Okay, so in terms of coarse woody debris,
humans have gone out into lakes,
being sort of, I don't know,
aspiring beavers or whatever we are,
we go out there, we find all these trees,
and we pull them out and we clean up the lakes.
We see them as obstructions to recreation.
We think the kids are gonna get hurt
on the fallen tree or something.
It gets in the way of our boat
moving around from one place to another.
The teenagers wanna burn it for firewood to have a bonfire.
Over the last hundred years, we've systematically
pulled out a lot of these trees.
And so when this habitat assessment was done,
it's like, wow, many of our lakes are almost
completely denuded of these trees
that normally would have accrued in the water body.
So in-lake habitat.
The other one is water quality threats from runoff.
There's basically a
long-term nutrification,
or adding of nutrients taking place
on just about every lake that has
any level of human activity around it.
Because we've modified the upland landscape
to make it drain more efficiently, usually towards the lake
or towards the rivers that feed into the lake.
Our human interest, unlike beavers,
our human interest is getting the water away.
To send the water down away from us
so that the basement doesn't flood,
so there's not ponds in the yard
where mosquitoes are gonna breed.
So we figure out ways to simplify the landscape
and move all the water off of it and in the process,
that now
rushed water
carries with it sediment and nutrients
that are gradually but certainly
building up in our lakes.
It's a long-term, mostly unseen threat
having to do with storm water runoff.
And a changing climate, and more dramatic storm events
are only gonna make that problem worse
and harder to deal with.
So what do we do?
What we're trying to do
is basically come up with a strategy
sounds a little crazy,
but we wanna work with literally millions of property owners
to get them on board with doing
good things with the land that they own
to protect the health of that lake.
Building off of Lowell's idea that these are the people
who have a vested interest
and a direct stake in what's going on
in that water body,
can we now really hold them to the fire
and say all right, come on board with us,
let's do some good things to protect these lakes.
So I'm gonna talk a bit about
this idea of a Healthy Lakes program.
It's brand new, it just started last year.
And it sort of represents, I think,
what we could be doing
easily for the next couple of decades.
I wanna point out that we're not dealing,
necessarily, with sites like this.
When I talk about Healthy Lakes, and this new initiative.
There's many places that are like this
that have very severe erosion problems.
These are projects where we need to involve
engineers and we need to figure out really
what's going on here and how do we fix it.
What I'm talking about are those
millions and millions of shoreline properties
where people, just being people,
and doing what they thought was the social norm
have modified the landscape in a way that
harms the lake's health.
So our practices are really summarized, sort of,
in this chart, or in this graphic,
showing some things in black and white,
and some things in color.
You see down here basically what I talked about
in terms of coarse woody debris
or trees in the water.
That's in the lake here.
The riparian zone immediately adjacent to the lake
is also critical for in-lake habitat.
And a scenario that has been in places
like Madison dramatically modified
and obliterated and replaced with, maybe,
stones, and replaced with bluegrass.
So how do we get native plants back in?
Up by the house, off to the right,
there's a rain garden.
It's a feature that's introduced
in order to allow storm water to infiltrate into the ground.
And near the driveway and the garage on the left,
there's basically a simple interception system
to slow down runoff
and prevent it from rushing off into the lake.
Intercept it and allow it to infiltrate.
I'll go through these really quickly.
So, Fish Sticks is what we're calling
this introduced coarse woody material.
You cannot just go around
and start cutting down trees
right adjacent to the lake.
Number one, there's rules against that.
Number two, that would defeat the purpose.
Instead, you have to find upland trees
and then bring them down to the lake
typically in the winter is the time you can do this
bring it out on the frozen ice.
You can see in this graphic,
they become cabled together
and then they become cabled to the shore
so that you don't have trees just sort of floating
out into the water body.
These are going to be staying exactly
where we want them to.
This is different than--
Some people are familiar with the concept of a fish crib
or just some sort of underwater structure
that fish, maybe adult fish, like to hang out in.
This piece of lake ecosystem
allows all the insects and all the small fish
to actually survive in a lake
that are the basis of the food web.
So this is an important piece,
and it's not the same as fish cribs.
If you're gonna put them in,
that area where they're gonna be attached to the shore,
you can't just have a bunch of rocks and turf grass there,
you have to have a native planting there.
This is just showing some folks
out on Pewaukee Lake in Waukesha County doing
a fish stick project.
Again, it's much easier
to do in the winter.
This is what it might look like, if you know.
Again, we're just hoping to get some
interesting coarse woody material
that has small branches.
It'll break down over time,
that's kind of how nature would have done things on its own.
The other part is just
getting people to restore their shores.
The DNR has been trying for decades
to try to get people to restore shores.
But their program previously said
you know, if you wanna do this,
we want you to basically do the whole thing.
We're only going to partner with you
and give you funding if you
fully restore your shoreland.
And we need you to sign a permanent deed restriction
that prevents the shoreland planting
from being removed.
Those two features basically
made most people back away.
They said, I'm not gonna do
a giant plant restoration project and
you want me to sign a deed restriction?
So instead, we've given people
a much smaller piece that they can work on.
We'll give them some money
to restore to put some plants in,
we'll cost share this and try to get people to start small.
Start with, you know, 350 feet actually isn't that small
if you've ever done some restoration
in your backyard or gardening.
But it's still much smaller than
a full
150 ft piece of shoreline.
We've gone so far as to
come up with different designs.
Through the last couple of decades
we've figured out sort of which plants work
and which plants don't work
in what types of soils in which parts of the state.
And so we've come up with really a good list, I think,
of plant material that people should be working with.
We want them to be successful.
To give you a sense of, again,
the scale that we're looking at,
here's just a sort of prototypical shoreland home
we're trying to show
here's roughly a 10 by 35 foot block.
We're not saying put this right
next to the pier where there's
a lot of foot traffic anyway.
Maybe look for a place where there's
already some erosion going on,
so you can attenuate that
while you're working on it.
But here's maybe about the scale
of what we wanna do.
This is one of our first examples.
This is from, this is now about a year and a half ago.
Again, this would have been just turf grass
coming down to the beach,
and instead we're getting a mixture of
many different native plants.
You in this picture, the fencing
and that's critical to keep deer out of this.
In many parts of the state
deer are in such large numbers
and they're so hungry
and they love just coming in
to newly planted projects and eating up
hundreds of dollars worth of plants.
So, the fencing is worth it
in those cases.
I mentioned the simple diversion.
This is not rocket science.
This is just a matter of,
you know, if you had this driveway
going down towards the lake, towards the home there,
in a big storm event all that storm water's
gonna just go along those ruts and head right down
and carry all the sediment with it.
Why not put in a fairly low tech diversion
in order to push the water off to the side
and allow it to infiltrate.
This'll be a cost-shareable activity with the DNR.
Similarly, if you have a garage out there
you don't have a basement under it
you can create
some people call these french drains
this is just an infiltration area
where the storm water is coming off the roof,
you don't even need a gutter system,
it's just gonna go into the rocks.
And then infiltrate into the ground
instead of becoming part of the storm water
heading down towards the lake.
An even more simple application,
here the driveway is paved.
That's fine, the storm water,
you can even see how it works,
because there's some sand and stuff
left from a recent storm.
But it's basically pushing it
into this little infiltration area
so that, again, it can more easily soak into the ground.
And not run off across the grass, join more runoff,
and then eventually get into the lake.
And Rain Gardens.
People in Dane County hopefully
are familiar with rain gardens now,
'cause these have been promoted pretty hard
here in Dane County for about 10 years.
This is just creating, again,
a divot type of garden.
Digging out an area, filling it in
with some compost an good soil,
and then chucking a bunch of deep-rooted native plants
in there that'll again help infiltrate
storm water instead of putting it out
into the system that ends up in the lakes and rivers.
This is an example of a rain garden
installed kind of between the
house and the lake you can see.
And again, they had to modify the landscape
a little bit to create this divot.
That's great, you know, what we've done
for the last 150 years is modify
the landscape to get rid of the divots
and to make it more simple.
So what we're doing is trying to atone for past sins
and fix things and make things
work better for the health of the lake.
So, first round of this
were able to touch about 48 different
properties around the state.
This is based on a competitive grant application process
that really leverages the lake partnership
because we're not asking individual
property owners to submit a grant application,
instead, we're asking those lake associations
the lake districts,
also counties can apply for this
and basically say yeah, we think we have
a bunch of people now who wanna cooperate and work on this,
so help us cost-share some of these projects
and let's get 'em rolling.
So a hundred practices, one year.
You know, how long is it gonna take
to get to a million?
(whistles)
If we stick at 100 per year,
it's gonna take forever to get to a million.
I'm never gonna get there, right?
What we're hoping this will become
is a new social norm around lakes.
And so we're actually working with people like
Bret Shaw, who's a community based
social marketing researcher here at UW-Madison.
We're working with other people who are sort of
social science and marketing specialists
to figure out ways that we can take this idea
and start promoting it in such a way
that it becomes the new norm.
That it just becomes a new practice.
Right now around lakes,
the norm is to have that manicured lawn
down to the grass.
It's ready to be photographed from the lake
so it can show up in a brochure
in a magazine that's selling lakeshore properties.
That's what we have.
What we need are these
healthier properties
that actually help out the lake.
And we think we can get there.
We think that
we've lowered some of the barriers to participation,
these first couple hundred projects
are gonna be sort of planting the seed
and getting things started.
And hopefully showing people that this doesn't--
We're not asking them to reverse their world views.
We're not asking them to totally turn everything upside down.
These should be pretty simple steps
that they could take.
And it isn't terribly expensive.
We're talking about $81,000 in state money
distributed to these projects,
and local money bringing that total up to about 126.
So this is, this is a cheap program.
That could scale, right?
If it only cost me $81,000 to do this,
I can easily do ten times as much at $810,000 right?
So that's where we wanna be.
But we don't think that the state
is gonna be funding this forever.
We think that in the future
10-20 years down the line,
the state will be able to wean
its piece of the investment off
because of that local norm.
Because people just start doing it
because everybody else has been doing it
and now our lakes are responding.
So, what I've given you
is just a taste of what we're up to
with the Wisconsin Lakes Partnership.
Again, it's about a 40-year
project right now.
I was sitting down with some people
and thinking about this just today,
and we were thinking like 40 years,
that's really not that long
in the grand scheme of these lakes,
it's really not that long in terms of
states and nations.
This project, somehow the Lakes Partnership,
really is hopefully gonna be
at some point a 200-year story
a 300-year story
and I think that's possible
because the people in Wisconsin
have that personal investment
in these water bodies.
That's a critical
variable though.
One of my concerns, I guess, as a professional
is that lakeshore property
and these cabins become more and more
an exclusive domain.
A place where only a fraction of the population
gets out to recreate.
And if that happens,
if the vast majority of people
in Wisconsin have no
personal connection to a lake,
they've never swam in one,
never played in a beach,
then I think that's really the threat
that could undercut this whole thing.
So we're also looking at ways
to try to ensure that there's
continuing public access
to these lakes.
And the DNR is a great partner, believe it or not, in that.
So I'm excited about the future
and I'm open to taking questions.
I thank you all for listening to this tale.
(applause)