What is LakeWatch?
LakeWatch is a volunteer-based water quality
monitoring program offered to Albertans who are interested in collecting information about their local lake or reservoir.
ALMS technicians assist volunteers to test the lakes 4 times during the summer, collecting important data such as water temperature, clarity, a suite of water chemistry parameters, invasive species, and other biological targets. Once all of the data is collected we produce a LakeWatch Report for the lake which summarizes the data in an easy-to-understand manner. LakeWatch Reports can be used to educate lake users and guide water restoration and management efforts. If you are interested in having your lake monitored as part of the LakeWatch program, please contact programs@alms.ca
Wondering what is involved in volunteering? Check out our LakeWatch Volunteer page!
What is LakeWatch Data Used For?
Water quality data is an important part of understanding or managing your lake ecosystem. Data collected by ALMS through the LakeWatch program can be useful in answering the question: “What is the ecological health of my lake as a whole?”, or “How is the health of my lake changing?”. As such, parameters collected by ALMS reflect some of the most important lake water quality variables: clarity, oxygen, temperature, nutrients, metals, cyanobacteria toxins, chlorophyll-a, zebra and quagga mussels, and more. Our stakeholders will find ALMS’ data useful for:
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- Getting curious about your lake ecosystem!
- Developing nutrient guidelines for your lake.
- Establishing ecological benchmarks before negative impacts occur at your lake.
- Assessing the effectiveness of your management efforts.
- Producing State of the Watershed Reports.
At the end of each season, data collected
through the LakeWatch program is uploaded into the Provincial Government’s water quality database. Once there, ALMS data becomes available for use by the public, resource managers, and academia. In order to ensure our stakeholders understand their lake data, ALMS compiles annual LakeWatch Reports. These reports summarize data in an easy-to-understand manner and are available free of charge online.
Understanding your lake’s historical water quality can be difficult in the absence of historical water quality data. Even with historical data, a robust data set is often required to establish statistical significance. For lakes with enough historical data, ALMS has undertaken Trend Analysis for Secchi depth (water clarity), total phosphorus, chlorophyll-a, and total dissolved solids, to investigate how those parameters have changed over time. Also consider supplementing LakeWatch data and Trend Analysis with local or traditional knowledge, or using modern scientific techniques, such as paleolimnology and satellite imagery, to better understand your lake’s history.
Which Lakes are Sampled? What Lakes have been Sampled?
Each year ALMS takes requests to have your lake sampled. Requests are prioritized based on the amount of historical data available for that lake, volunteer availability, and urgency. After sorting through the requests, we will select: 10 lakes which meet our priorities (Base Lakes), 6-10 lakes in the Lakeland Industry and Community Association boundaries pending funding (LICA Lakes), 5 Provincial Park Lakes, and any additional lakes that are sampled on contract for an additional fee. If you are interested in having your lake monitored under the LakeWatch program, please contact us at programs@alms.ca.
LakeWatch has been a highly successful program, collecting rigorous water quality data since 1996. In total, the program has monitored water quality at over 125 unique lakes across Alberta, some over multiple years, for a total of over 500 annual monitoring records. The animation below gives you a sense of the spread of lakes monitored by LakeWatch. Dots on the map represent lakes sampled by the program, while the size of dot represents the number of times a lake has been sampled.
View our Complete List of Lakes Sampled, since 2021.
Brittany Onysyk, Program Manager
Growing up in a rural setting in Alberta, Brittany developed a great adoration of the environment. She has fond childhood memories camping around the province, and spent many summer days at lakes in the greater Edmonton region (especially Miquelon!). Having a deep appreciation for the environment and a desire to conserve it, Brittany graduated from the University of Alberta in 2018 with a B.Sc. in Environmental & Conservation Sciences, majoring in Land Reclamation. Brittany has held various field-based positions throughout the province, and is looking forward to expanding her knowledge on lake ecosystems as the Program Manager at ALMS. When she’s not out on the lake, you’ll find her out exploring with her dogs!
Jordyn Lajeunesse, LakeWatch Technician
Jordyn’s passion for the outdoors developed while growing up in Saskatchewan, spending most of her time at the lakes. She was immersed in numerous activities, including camping, fishing, and other water recreational activities. She continues pursuing outdoor activities like backcountry camping, hiking, and exploring Alberta’s vast nature. She graduated from MacEwan University in 2023 with a B.Sc. majoring in Biology, and worked as a Satellite Technician for ALMS in the 2023 field season. She is excited to be back as a LakeWatch Technician this year and to spend time outside sampling and exploring more of Alberta’s beautiful lakes.
Angela Pham, LakeWatch Technician
Angela is an Edmonton local who found interest in protecting the environment through school camping trips and family visits to national parks. She recently finished the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment program at NAIT and also holds a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from MacEwan University. She has supported research projects in forest reclamation through lab and field work. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, bouldering, and gardening. Angela is excited to begin her first season as a LakeWatch Technician and learn more about monitoring water quality in Alberta’s lakes.
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).