When an invasive species overruns an ecosystem, it is often assumed that the organism recently arrived at its new home and rapidly took over. But a report published in the journal, BioScience, says that many …
Learn Your Lakes
Video: Why We’re Spending Another Winter Snowplowing a Bog
This year marks the second season for our ambitious winter limnology experiment up in Vilas County. In case you missed our initial post about why in the world someone would spend all winter plowing a …
Annual PSA: To Keep Our Freshwater Fresh, We Must Be Smart About Winter Salt
Winter in the colder climes of North America means a lot of things – frozen lakes, white blankets of snow and, far too often, the crunch of salt crystals underfoot. While we use salt to …
Winter in Wisconsin: Life on Ice
For those of us lucky enough to live where our lakes freeze in the winter, one of the true joys of the season is getting out on the ice. Suddenly, a space that was only …
Why Do We Say Lake Mendota is Frozen Before it’s Fully Frozen?
This weekend, the Center for Limnology Twitter account was tagged in a post from the UW Department of Emergency Medicine’s chief flight physician and pilot, Mike Abernethy, who had been flying a helicopter over Lake …
Where Does Lake Mendota’s Freeze Date Fall in Historic Average?
In case you missed the news, Lake Mendota was officially deemed “frozen” by the Wisconsin State Climatology Office on Sunday. That January 3rd “ice on” date is about two weeks later than the median freeze …
Will Madison’s Lakes Get Ice for Christmas?
If you’ve been checking the forecast for Christmas Eve here in Wisconsin, you’ve no doubt seen that a bit of a cold snap is on its way. While the past several days have hovered just …
‘Epic’ Summer Road Trip Reveals the Big Impact Small Streams Have on Great Lakes
MADISON – In the summer of 2018, Rob Mooney, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Limnology, set out on an epic road trip around Lake Michigan. Mooney was no stranger to …
Learn Your Lakes. What’s a Watershed?
Last week was the first time in a while that hunkering down at home for days on end was a response to weather and not a decision driven by spiking COVID numbers. Here in south/central …
Guest Post: An Invasive Species and An Education on An Ever-Changing Lake
by Julia Buskirk – In 2015, Petra Wakker began her college experience alongside Lake Mendota. She was no stranger to this waterway—before walking alongside the lake on her way to classes at UW-Madison, Wakker had …