L&S News  Tag: Limnology

New research could help lake managers make more informed decisions about their invasive species control strategies.

A panel of eight experienced artists and scientists judged the scientific, aesthetic and creative qualities of 171 images and videos submitted by UW–Madison faculty, staff and students — a record number of entries for the eighth annual competition.

A new study finds that urban green spaces like backyards, city parks and golf courses contribute substantially to the ecological fabric of our cities — and the wider landscape — and should be included in ecological data.

When the lakes are frozen, Madison is a winter wonderland. But reliable ice and deep snow are becoming the anomaly. We’re losing something magical.

“We’re monkeying with the very chemical foundation of these ecosystems,” said Emily H. Stanley, a limnologist (freshwater ecologist) at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. “But right now we don’t know enough yet to know where we’re going. To me, scientifically that’s really interesting, and as a human a little bit frightening.”

“When we’re throwing down road salt, we might be thinking about the fact that we’re putting salt into the water, but we’re not thinking that it may also mobilize lead,” says Hilary Dugan, a limnologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dugan has studied lakes in North America, which she also found to be increasing in salinity.

In recent decades, change has defined our environment in the United States. Agriculture intensified. Urban areas sprawled. The climate warmed. Intense rainstorms became more common. But, says a new University of Wisconsin–Madison study, while those kinds of changes usually result in poor water quality, lakes have surprisingly stayed the same.

A study of more than 5,000 Wisconsin lakes shows that nearly a quarter of them have become murkier in the past two decades. This trend could get worse as a changing climate leads to increased precipitation. However, the study also shows most lakes have stayed the same and some are even seeing an improvement in clarity.

Last fall, students in a UW-Madison undergraduate limnology lab found invasive zebra mussels living in Lake Mendota for the first time. Researchers monitoring for the invader continued to see the mussel only sporadically. Sometime in the last four months, however the team has started to find them congregating in large numbers all over Lake Mendota.