Your Link to Muskoka's Water!

Establishment of biological baselines in the Muskoka River Watershed and development of a diatom index for assessing lake and riverine health

Andrew Paterson (PI/Dorset OMOE)
Roland Hall (co-PI/University of Waterloo)
Jennifer Winter (co-PI/OMOE)
Mark MacDougall (MSc/University of Waterloo)

University of Waterloo M.Sc. student Mark MacDougall and a team of others will sample more than 100 lakes within the Muskoka River Watershed. Mark will focus on the periphyton, or attached algae, that is commonly found on rocks and cobbles along lake shorelines. His goal is to improve our understanding of how biological communities respond to environmental stressors, complimenting existing monitoring that focuses on lake chemistry.

Specifically, Mark will first explore how nearshore algal communities vary naturally across the watershed, focusing on the most pristine lakes. Next, he will evaluate how these communities are altered with increasing disturbance. For example, how sensitive are algal communities to increasing shoreline development, or to the removal of forests? With these answers in hand, it may be possible to assess future changes to our lakes, and to develop powerful, new monitoring programs that take into account biological changes.

Update - November 2013

 
During the summer of 2012, University of Waterloo MSc student Mark MacDougall and
a team of others sampled 86 lakes within the Muskoka River Watershed. Sampling focused on nearshore periphyton, or attached algae, commonly found on rocks and
cobbles along lake shorelines. The goal of this work is to improve our understanding of how biological communities respond to environmental stressors, complementing existing monitoring tools that focus solely on lake water chemistry.

Since his return to the lab, Mark has explored how nearshore algal communities vary naturally across the watershed, focusing on the most pristine lakes. Currently, he is evaluating how the composition of algal communities (i.e., the relative abundances of each species) varies with increasing watershed disturbance. For example, do algal communities change with increasing shoreline development, with the salting of roads in winter, or with the removal of forests?

New data suggest that there is a strong relationship between the degree of watershed disturbance and the nearshore algal community. In other words, the types of algae found along the shorelines of pristine lakes are very different from those found in more disturbed lakes. Using this knowledge, Mark is now developing an intuitive, biological monitoring tool that will complement existing water quality programs and provide an early-warning indicator of nearshore disturbances in lakes.