Climate Change Challenge
Habitat and Species Conservation
Project Alignment with ResilientMass Plan Priority Actions
Lake level management recommendations to abate cyanobacteria blooms
Climate Resilience Project Scope
The project focused on using remote imaging to identify algal blooms in relation to lake water level fluctuations that coincided with intentional human-induced lake level manipulation. The project also used web-based tools to predict the likelihood of refilling a lake that had been drawdown considering variables like watershed size and rainfall estimates. The work is critical in response to global lake ice loss and increased algal blooms
Metrics and Results
Our partners developed a Google Colab Tool for assessing an individual lake’s potential to refill based on drawdown criteria and climate. They also created and shared a Google Earth Engine platform for extracting water quality and bloom indicators from remote sensing.
Best Practices and Lessons Learned
Without this work it is extremely difficult for lake and pond drawdown practitioners to understand how long it will take a lake to refill once drawn down. This informs the practice of lake and pond drawdown as used for aquatic vegetation control or for any other purpose. Combined with enhanced bathymetry collected by MassWildlife, this work also highlights the extent of shoreline exposed which can adversely impact rare species. The work was able to illustrate that algal blooms could be detected and measured repeatedly under ongoing climate change.
Further Action
While the work was able to document algal blooms, it was unable to develop signature detection specific to cyanobacteria. Additional information is needed from satellite imagery to more specifically identify algal blooms.