ALMS conducts education and outreach events throughout the year.
There is a growing concern for water in Alberta, and the recognition that we need to manage our water resources in a more sustainable fashion. But to understand how to treat our water ways (lakes, streams, wetlands, rivers, etc) and how to protect their natural beauty and health, we must first lay a foundation of knowledge by teaching about water quality and the risks associated with water quality deterioration. Below is a list of ALMS’ education and outreach programs.
Beach Outreach
An initiative was started in 2012 to educate lake users face-to-face on water quality, lake watershed health, and blue-green algae at beaches during peak summer months. An educator travels to beaches throughout Central and Northern Alberta to distribute information and engage lake users. On many occasions this is done in collaboration with a local Watershed Stewardship Group and at a festival or cultural event.
AWQA Events
![DSC_0514[1]](https://alms.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DSC_05141.jpg)
A core tool we use to teach about water quality is our AWQA test kits. We can bring kits to your group and head out together to sample a local waterbody. These are ideal for groups of children.
Workshops and Presentations
The Society organizes an annual workshop and AGM at a different Alberta lake community each fall with the help of local stewardship groups. In addition, we have 
offered smaller workshops/webinars. For example, we partnered with the First Nation Technical Services Advisory Group as well as Cows and Fish to host lake watershed monitoring workshops at Battle Lake. We partnered with the North Saskatchewan Riverkeeper and the University of Alberta to host a seminar on the Health Impacts of Blue Green Algae during Canada Water Week. We are often asked to speak about lake management at lake associations’ Annual General Meetings.
Contact Brad if you would like us to participate or host an outreach event for your group.
The members of the steering committee will continue to play a strong role in facilitating and tracking implementation actions. This includes any actions they were responsible for, as well as tracking other committees and sector’s actions and progress made towards achieving the plan’s outcomes. Ongoing communication is essential to successful implementation and achieving outcomes, therefore a regular reporting mechanism could be set up in order to provide regular evaluation of the plan.
Reporting is an essential component of any watershed management planning and implementation process. There are two main types of reporting that should be shared with stakeholders on a regular basis: implementation reporting & effectiveness reporting.
There is no limit to the number or types of lake management actions, but they typically fall into the categories on the right.
Helpful resources
The development of a lake watershed management plan provides the guidance needed to implement activities, but the plan cannot be static. Monitoring the performance of your management actions is essential to understanding whether your goals have been met, and whether further actions are needed. Monitoring and evaluating the implementation and effectiveness of a lake watershed management plan allows assessment of progress towards the goals and objectives of the plan, identification of problems and opportunities, and a collection of critical information required when performing a 5 or 10 year review of the plan.
What has the monitoring results of the plan and of the indicators shown? Is there a need to modify the plan? It is important that the lake watershed management plan does not just sit on a shelf. Information gaps should be addressed, action items need to be managed, completed, and evaluated to best address the needs of the lake. Always keep in mind the vision: if the actions taken are not bringing the lake closer to that vision, then the plan needs to be modified. Consider updating both the state of the watershed and the lake watershed management plans at regular intervals to make sure that the actions taken were achieving the desired outcomes and to evaluate what work still needs to be done.
Once a plan has been approved by all affected sectors and officially endorsed and released by the steering committee, then implementation can begin in full. Action projects can be large and comprehensive, or made smaller by staging projects over time or into modules that can be tackled one at a time. Fundraising is an issue that many community groups may find intimidating, but experience with programs such as the Pine Lake Restoration Program (see 
This graphic describes how the various committees and groups will work and interact together. The circle size depicts the approximate number of people involved, and the circles overlapping indicates that some individuals may reside in all of the circles and participate in multiple committees as part of the planning process. The technical committee is shown as an arrow, indicating that it is independent and has relatively few people, and yet it interacts with all of the groups. This graphic may look different depending on the lake and the people involved, and a detailed structure should be agreed upon and described in the plan’s Terms of Reference (Step 6).
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