The Lake Stewardship Community of Practice is hosted by the Alberta Lake Management Society and supported by the Land Stewardship Centre of Canada.
WHAT: The objectives of the Community of Practice are to connect, invigorate, and engage Alberta’s lake watershed stewards. Our vision is a province where lake stewards are present, respected, connected, and knowledgeable stakeholders who are able to undertake community level action to advocate for healthy lakes for Alberta’s future.
HOW: In order to achieve this vision, ALMS is coordinating quarterly virtual meetings where lake stewards can network, share information, and feel a part of a community. This Community of Practice is open to anyone with an interest in lake stewardship. If you would like to become a part of the Community, you can sign up for a free ALMS membership, here.
WHEN: The next Lake Stewardship Community of Practice will take place in Spring 2024 – stay tuned!
Previous meetings:
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| May 2022 | Community Engagement featuring Blake Bartlett of the Wizard Lake Watershed Stewardship Society |
| July 2022 | Advocating for your Lake featuring Don Davidson and Catherine Pierce of the Pigeon Lake Watershed Association |
| September 2022 | Lake Management SWOT Analysis |
| February 2023 | High and Low Lake Water Levels: featuring Kellie Nichiporik of the Moose Lake Watershed Society and Peter Cordingley of the Muriel Lake Basin Management Society |
| July 2023 | In Lake Treatment: featuring Richard Normandeau of the Half Moon Lake Residents Association |
| November 2023 | Lake Watershed Stewardship Groups - Challenges and Opportunities featuring Sturgeon Lake Stewards, Healthy Waters Lac la Biche, and Cooking Lake Moraine Stewardship Society |
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).