As fall turns to winter and layers of skim ice form in the bays and shallows of Madison’s lakes, another seasonal phenomenon is taking place on the open water. Currently, the far eastern bay of Lake Monona near Olbrich park is filled with thousands of migratory water fowl. From water birds like the American coot, …
In case you missed his editorial in Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal, Dick Lathrop (who spent four decades with the Wisconsin DNR studying the Yahara lakes and holds an honorary appointment with the Center for Limnology) had some thoughts on lake levels and flooding: by Dick Lathrop — Much good reporting has been done about the unprecedented …
In 2014, the Water, Sustainability and Climate Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published “Yahara 2070” a series of stories about potential futures for the Madison area and the Yahara watershed. Using a combination of published scientific research, computer modeling and a dose of science fiction, a team of researchers attempted to answer the following …
In case you’ve somehow missed the news, let’s just say that it’s been wet in Wisconsin over the last week. Really, really wet. Here in Madison we’re still holding our breath, filling up sandbags and hoping no new major rain event pushes water-levels even higher. Already, our lakes have hit near-record water levels, causing floods …
Earlier this week, Center for Limnology director, Jake Vander Zanden, noted a startling difference in Madison’s two largest lakes, Mendota and Monona. The waters of Lake Monona, near where he lives, were crystal clear, while the waters along the shoreline of Lake Mendota, where he works, were green and murky. The two lakes are connected …
(This article was originally published January 22, 2018 and has been updated with photos from January 2022) by Adam Hinterthuer – Two weeks ago, I walked down the hill from my house to do something I’d never done before. On the shoreline of Lake Monona, in the time it took my wife to get herself …
Lake Monona is crystal clear, while Mendota stays murky and, on Wednesday, we asked you to help us monitor Lake Mendota as we wait to see if the native zooplankton, daphnia pulicaria, can rally and clear up the situation after being decimated by a tiny invasive predator called the spiny water flea. Read that previous …
As we enter field season here at the Center for Limnology and people all over Madison are pulling their tackle boxes out of the garage and their boats out of storage, we’d like to showcase an excellent Clean Lakes Alliance video. It’s a report on the state of Madison lakes in 2013, and it features …
Ted Bier, our senior research specialist for the Long-Term Ecological Research program, was recently photographed on Lake Monona holding this massive chunk of ice in front of the Madison skyline. That picture led to the following story on The Capital Times website: How thick is the ice on Madison’s lakes? Researcher Ted Bier almost didn’t …
Forgive the late post here, but your trusty blog author has been out and about in the Rocky Mountain front range for the past few days. But, never fear, it’s still Friday here in the Mountain Standard Time Zone and that means it’s still the day that Wisconsin offers up its fabulous fish fry dinners …