Sampling Water Quality on Lake Champlain's Malletts Bay

Mark Mitchell, Lake Monitoring and Community Outreach Coordinator with Lake Champlain Sea Grant, spent a day this fall on Mallets’s Bay with a reporter for a local newspaper. From a boat operated by Lake Champlain Basin Program environmental scientist, Pete Stangel, Mitchell took lake water visibility, or clarity, readings using a Secchi disk and sampled water for cyanobacteria to measure the health of the bay.

Mitchell heads up a group of volunteers who regularly take these same measurements throughout the basin. Data collected by about 90 volunteer monitors help Vermont scientists keep tabs on lake and basin health, including possible polluting sediments, harmful cyanobacteria levels, and healthy plankton communities that support life in the lake.

Lake Champlain Sea Grant partners with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation's Lakes Lay Monitoring Program, a state-wide volunteer water quality sampling network initiated in 1979 and representing more than 100 inland lakes and 40 Lake Champlain stations.

Read the full story, “The View from Mallets Bay: Sampling paints water quality picture of bay” by Michael Frett on pages 8-9 in The Islander, a weekly newspaper of the Lake Champlain Islands.