Each year ALMS hires field technicians to conduct LakeWatch’s water quality monitoring. Field technicians have a technical diploma or degree in environmental sciences or a related field, and receive a month of training with ALMS and Environment and Parks Environmental Monitoring and Science Division.
Caleb Sinn, Program Manager
Caleb’s passion for freshwater ecology developed after spending many summers throughout his childhood at Gull Lake, exploring Alberta’s mountain national parks, and fishing in southern British Columbia. He graduated from the University of Alberta in 2019 with a B.Sc. double-major in Biology and Chemistry, and focused his studies specifically on community and freshwater ecology, environmental chemistry, and analytical chemistry. He also spent two years working on freshwater ecology projects ranging from mountain lake sampling to cyanobacteria monitoring and algal pigment analysis at the University of Alberta. Caleb was a LakeWatch technician in the summer of 2019, and looks forward to coordinating lake monitoring projects and public outreach across Alberta as the ALMS Program Manager.
Kurstyn Cappis, LakeWatch Technician
Kurstyn’s love for lakes began as a child where she spent many summers at Pigeon Lake with her family and has continued on as an adult, through always searching for new lakes to set up a tent by. She graduated from the University of Alberta in 2015 with a B.Sc. in Environmental and Conservation Sciences and a major in Conservation Biology. She has spent time working on projects involved with invasive species monitoring, developing land management plans and wildlife rehabilitation. She is looking forward to learning more about aquatic ecosystems this summer and sharing her passion of the outdoors with all of the volunteers.
Dominic Wong, LakeWatch Technician
Dominic’s interest in freshwater restoration has flourished over the years, and began where he grew up by the Pacific Ocean. He graduated from the King’s University in 2016 with a B.Sc. in Biology as well as Conservation Biology Diploma from NAIT in May 2022. He spent the summer of 2015 researching sculpin species association with freshwater environmental quality in the Manistee watershed in Michigan, USA. He also spent three summers at Elk Island National Park doing public education about wildlife and conservation. Dominic looks forward to the exciting learning opportunities while water monitoring and sharing stories with lake volunteers as he travels to various Alberta lakes in summer 2022.
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).