Your trusty blog editor is taking an ill-advised road trip to Portland for a wedding this week, so we apologize for the delay in programming. In the last couple of weeks, though, we’ve seen a flurry of great coverage of limnology in the news.
Below are some excellent examples:
30 Years of Research Winds Down in Little Rock Lake – Wisconsin Public Radio
A curtain is literally rising on Little Rock Lake, as a nearly 30-year research effort into air and water pollution there is winding down.
When scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Department of Natural Resources, and other agencies lowered a plastic curtain into a pristine hourglass-shaped lake in the Northern Highland American Legion State Forest in 1984, it drew national attention. The barrier blocked water and effectively split Little Rock Lake into two basins. Listen here.
Small Lakes, Big Picture – WXPR
Say you’re a scientist who studies lakes. How do you choose which one to to study? Chances are you’ll pick one that’s a pretty good size…like Trout Lake, or Crystal Lake. You might pick one with a lot of species of fish, or one the public uses for recreation. But what about the tiny lakes…the backyard ones so small they may not even have names, or the ones that dry up completely when it doesn’t rain for a while? One researcher from the University of Wisconsin at Madison thinks those lakes are just as important as the big ones, and she’s doing a survey of small lakes in the Northwoods. Listen here.
Troubled Waters – The Walrus Magazine
One chilly October morning, Beth Cheever hopped out of an aluminum boat. In rubber boots, a life jacket, and a knit hat pulled down over her ears, she walked the portage trail, beneath denuded alders and paper birches damp with the previous night’s rain, to the granite shoreline. She had never poisoned a lake before. Yet the thirty-two-year-old ecologist from New Hampshire had driven her Dodge Caravan twenty-two hours from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, to this corner of northwestern Ontario, just thirty minutes from the Manitoba border, with a plan to do just that. Keep reading.