University Place

Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab, I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension and on behalf of those folks and our other core organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks, again, for coming to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Eric Olson.

He's with UW-Extension Lakes and he partners with UW-Stevens Point, which is where he's located. He was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, got his undergraduate degree in Natural Resources at the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, and then he came here to get his advanced degrees in Urban Planning.

In 2004, he joined UW-Extension Cooperative Extension and in 2011, you took your current job with the Lakes folks. This is a big deal for Wisconsin and how we view and treat our lakes, and how much of that is private property, and how much of that public domain, and how all that inter-plays. It's been a point of discussion at least since our constitution in 1848. It's going to be very interesting to hear what the science has to say about how we do all these very interesting community-based natural resource management projects in protecting our lakes of Wisconsin.

Please join me in welcoming Eric Olson to Wednesday Night @ The Lab. (applause) Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Tom, and thanks everybody for coming out on a brisk, cool Wednesday evening. Again, I'm Eric Olson.

I do work for UW-Extension. Part of what you're gonna see here is really sort of a tour of one little wing of UW-Extension. And I like this particular wing, not just because I work there, but because I really think it embodies this concept of the Wisconsin Idea. You're gonna hear some things just sort of in this review of about 40-50 years of history that should ring true if you know some things about the Wisconsin Idea and the relationship between UW and the grand population of the state of Wisconsin.

Also in, sort of the idea of thanking people up front, I do want to recognize the people that kind of work along with me and that support me. These folks, most of them work in Stevens Point. They're all UW-Extension employees. A couple of them actually work out of an office in the DNR's regional headquarters up in Rhinelander.

But these are my people who I work with. We are outreach specialists, which basically means we do things like this. We go around the state and we give people explanatory talks about different topics. In our case, lakes and natural resources.

We have a couple of programs I'm gonna talk about. One of them is this AIS Aquatic Invasive Species. Erin McFarlane, in the upper right corner there, she's our volunteer coordinator for Aquatic Invasive Species. Also, something called Citizen Lake Monitoring Network, Paul Skawinski is our most recent hire into our office, and he coordinates a state-wide program to monitor lake water quality.

And then we have a tremendous support staff, as well. People who keep our web page operating and keep our communications vibrant. If that's the cast, you know, for me and UW-Extension, this represents pretty much our setting. It's the lakes of Wisconsin.

They're beautiful, most people in the state have some sort of personal story that they can relate to a lake. Whether it's the lakes here in Dane County, or maybe it's the Great Lakes, they grew up in Milwaukee, or maybe it's a lake up north, a place where they had a cabin. But this is sort of the setting for our work. And what I'm gonna do is kind of unravel this tale of how a partnership has evolved between citizens, property owners, lakeshore property owners, cabins and homeowners, as well as the Department of Natural Resources and its programs to deal with lake and water quality, and then the University as another part of that partnership.

In terms of that setting, you all hopefully have some understanding that there's about by some measures, there's about 16,000 lakes in the state of Wisconsin. The majority of those, more than half of them, are very small lakes, they'd be the size of this room, maybe, or smaller. So we don't typically think of those as the kind of lakes we know about and instead there's about 6,000 lakes that are probably the kind you would come across and recognize and say "Ah, there's one of Wisconsin's many thousand lakes." Our lakes are a big driver for tourism. As long ago as a hundred years ago, trains of people were coming up from the Chicago region and from the Twin Cities to go up north, to get away from it all, to go fishing, to relax basically.

And even today, you know, it kind of boggles the mind to of the many thousands of people who work maybe a factory job or an office job and they're basically banking up their vacation time, they're saving money, they're putting it into account so that they can take that time and take that money and go into northern Wisconsin and relax. And so there we're talking millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars every year of tourism dollars coming in. There's also a real estate value of these lakes. Most lakeshore property, if anyone's ever been in the marketplace for trying to buy lakeshore property, it's priced by the linear foot.

How many feet of shoreline do you have? And then the price per foot right now is typically right around $1,000. It can go higher than that on certain lakes, it can certainly go lower on lakes that are less desirable, but $1000 is a pretty good estimate. If you multiply that out across some of the shoreline, maybe you'd come up with a number around a hundred billion dollars just of real estate value for shoreland land.

For people in Wisconsin, these lakes are a piece of quality of life. Everybody has, I think, an opportunity to get to a lake, hopefully go out and recreate in a lake. We have about 550 public beaches in the state, where people can just go without paying a fee and get into a lake and go swimming. A lot of people take their kids to those beaches.

It also just helps people, I think, to relax. Just knowing that they can go sit by a lake it really does improve, I think, the quality of life. And then another big factor that maybe most people don't think about is just the ecology. The plants and animals of Wisconsin just would not be the same if it weren't for its wet nature, if it weren't for all these lakes and rivers.

So it's important to keep these things in mind as we're thinking about why do we get involved in lakes. So, again, people like to have fun in lakes. People like to recreate, as well as I think relax. You know, this looks like pretty pretty nice calming scene here, doing his fishing at sunset.

Again, that ecology, you know. We wouldn't have loons in Wisconsin if we didn't have these lakes. And in fact, the loons require a very certain type of lake. And so we have to be careful in how we manage these lakes.

Another part of that setting in my mind, is really the social setting. That there's groups of people out there those property owners, as individuals, but also, they've gotten together to form organizations, to form groups. Initially these were just non-profit associations. The first lake associations were forming over 100 years ago in southeast Wisconsin.

And people would kind of get together and informally come up with maybe ideas for how they could protect their lake and try to be involved in how the lake was gonna be managed. But we knew that there's basically, as long ago as 40-50 years ago, we knew that there were many of these organizations out there we weren't sure sort of what they were up to. We also have things called lake districts in Wisconsin. And this isn't just a description of a geological region or geographical region, a lake district is actually a local unit of government.

It's a formally created local unit of government that actually has the ability to raise money through a property tax. And I'll talk a bit about how those came into being. But we have currently over 200 of those. There's also may groups that are organizing at the county scale to deal with a whole set of issues that might encompass all the lakes and rivers in a county.

And then this last bullet here, I just point out that this, this situation, where we have these lakes that are basically owned by everybody, but not really. It's too much of a job, really, to ask the Department of Natural Resources to take care of 6,000-16,000 lakes. They just could never do it. We could never, the taxpayers could never afford to hire all the resource managers needed to take care of these lakes.

But we have these local people, and we wonder, at least some researchers were wondering in the 1960s, could we leverage those people? Could we leverage these institutions to be our partners? And part of what we would need to do this classic extension in these bullets is related to we would need to reach out, we need to develop an educational program to make sure people understand the lake problems that they're facing. We'd also maybe need to help them develop their organizations.

If they're just an informal group of buddies who get together and complain about fishing, how can we move them along an organizational continuum to maybe being problem solvers and people who can be part of the solution? And then, leadership development is something that Extension does statewide, as well. Recognize that there's people out there who are passionate and sincere about addressing an issue, but they need maybe a little bit of assistance and a little bit of guidance to help get them on the path to addressing those problems in an efficient way, and really carrying out what they feel is kind of bugging them. And in the case of lake people, there's plenty of people who have concerns and issues about their lakes.

So now we'll get into sort of the thick of the plot. I've already hinted at these Lake Organizations. I think they're sort of the part that makes all this exciting and interesting. This research that took place in the 1960s and 70s, involved this character, Lowell Klessig.

He got his PhD here at UW-Madison. He studied under Steve Born, some of you might have heard of Steve Born, he was an important person in water resource management in the state for many decades. Lowell's research project under Steve was basically to go around to lake association meetings in the late 1960s and early 1970s and just observe what exactly they're up to, try and learn from them in terms of what their issues are and what their problems are, and then to also do a survey. He did a survey of all these lake organizations to find out what role could they possibly play in a more coherent and focused lake management program in the state.

And you can kind of see his results here. He just said these property owners are really the only group that have that personal interest and really the proximity, they're right on the lake, to get involved in managing individual lakes. His concern at the time was that as just voluntary groups, they weren't always respected by, say, town government, or county government, or certainly by state government. And they also lacked financial means.

They were reliant on simply dues or donations and fundraisers, so they always found themselves basically spending their time trying to raise money instead of taking care of the issues that they wanted to take care of. The classic Wisconsin Idea part of this story is really what happened after Lowell and Steve and their other fellow researchers published their results. Lawmakers worked with faculty at UW-Madison in the law school and said how do we address this? What could we do?

And they said well we can actually create a chapter and statutes that allows these lake organizations to form these lake districts. And then these lake districts could be formal partners with the Wisconsin DNR. You could create a funding program that essentially relies on the lake districts to raise roughly half the money needed to take care of a lake project, and then the DNR would bring the other half. And the DNR would also bring some expertise to the table.

But in this way, we would essentially be partners. We wouldn't rely just on the state to solve the problem, and we wouldn't rely just on the local property owners to solve the problem. The statute was adopted within a year of its introduction, and then lo and behold we had a brand new Wisconsin Lakes Management program. And that classic extension need came back again.

Okay, if we're gonna start propagating new little units of government around the state, someone needs to kind of explain to them what the rules of the road are, and how to interpret Chapter 33, which is the lake district part of the statutes. Chapter 33, you know, most people might be able to read it and it would be obvious to them what what the statute means but it would really help to have someone answer questions and help interpret it. And Lowell was then hired, actually, as the first statewide Extension Lake Specialist. So his research translated directly into law, which then translated directly into an outreach program for UW-Extension to partner with these lake associations.

And he was uniquely situated because his research actually got him to be familiar with hundreds and hundreds of different groups, and many hundreds of individuals around the state. So, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Lowell for getting this all started. This is kind of where we're at today as far as these organizations. You may not be able to see this in the back.

The blue counties are differentiated from the green in that they have a county-wide organization. So in addition to having small lake associations or lake districts, there's a group that gets together at the county scale to try to address county scale problems and issues. And then the numbers in here indicate what portion of the lakes larger than 20 acres have a lake association. So if we go to one of our most lake-rich counties is Vilas County in extreme north central Wisconsin.

There's 426 of these relatively large lakes, and out of them, 84, or roughly 20% have an organization that's formed now to help co-manage those lakes. Down in the southeast part of the state, we actually see I think a much more saturation of organizations. Waukesha County, which has 49 of these larger lakes, has 40 such organizations. Washington County, it's 16 out of 18.

So in many places in the state, basically every lake has something either a lake association or a lake district helping to address the issues. One of the things that Lowell recognized in the early 1970s is that he needed to have a communications vehicle to keep up with all these folks, and to explain to them what's going on with Chapter 33, and if there's gonna be changes in the statute. What's going on with their fellow lake districts, these new organizations forming around the state. And so he settled on the idea of a quarterly newsletter that could be distributed to a mailing list that he would develop.

And so this is a copy, just a scanned version of Lowell's very first Lake Tides Newsletter, published in the early 1970s. And so you can see it was sort of the old fashioned typeset stuff, you can see the UW-Extension logo on there, and it's a newsletter for people who are interested in Wisconsin's inland lakes. For the people in the room, I brought copies of the newsletter. Some of you already have them.

And you can find this online. Our current newsletter looks not dramatically different from what it started as, but we're essentially now in the 40th year of producing this newsletter on a quarterly basis and distributing it around the state. Our physical, hard copy mailing list is about 22,000 addresses, both in Wisconsin and outside of Wisconsin. And then we have thousands of people who have signed up to get it electronically.

They get a email that links to a PDF. And we just continue to use this as our main communication vehicle to try to keep people up to speed with what's going on in lakes and to try to continue doing that classic extension challenge of ensuring that people are educated on some of the basics of lake ecology. Lowell spent a lot of his time in the 70s driving all around the state of Wisconsin meeting up with people. He was pretty involved in just driving from one meeting to the other.

He spent a lot of his time on the road. And then he'd have sort of regional meetings where he'd try to explain to people again in person what Chapter 33 was all about and why they might wanna form a lake district. Starting in the late 1970s, he realized, and the people he was working with told him, you know what, we should do just one big gathering. One big statewide get-together.

Instead of all these little gatherings around the state, why don't we throw a conference. So in 1979, they organized the first statewide conference for lake people as well as the DNR and UW folks to get together. This is just a cover of our recent agenda for the 2015 conference. We're right now in the production part of putting together the 2016 conference.

For the folks in the room, I have a little card that kind of gives you the web page and how you can find out more about our conference. It's pretty involved. We typically have between 60-100 different presenters over the course of three days. Packed all in to one conference center.

The number up there this chart up in the upper right corner is just showing how many people register each year. So people in the back may not be able to see. We typically get between 450 and 550 people coming to the statewide conference once every year. We also recognized later on this need for leadership development.

Lowell Klessig was also involved in the creation of Wisconsin's Rural Leadership Program, which has evolved now into what's called just Leadership Wisconsin. And he took some of these same concepts of trying to challenge individuals to expand their horizons, understanding, I think, the policy aspects of lake management, the science aspects of lake management, and basically distill this into a course that we call Lake Leaders. We offer this every other year. We recruit people around the state.

We take nominations from people, if they know of a neighbor or someone else who maybe could benefit from a leadership course like this. We gather all their names, we ask them then to apply, to formally apply and put down a deposit and join us in Lake Leaders. We have three different sessions that we go through with them. The first session is really about exploring, maybe, personality styles and problem-solving skills.

How you deal with conflict in situations where maybe people don't agree on what the definition of the problem, itself, is. So that's our first session. Our second session takes place up at Kemp Station, which is a UW-Madison research station up in northern Wisconsin. It has a boathouse that's actually built right on top of the lake.

We get to use that as a classroom and then go out on the lake and do some learning about lake science and what does the DNR and the University do to better understand lake issues. And then we have a culminating session in the Fall. Held usually outside of Baraboo. We have a graduation ceremony that takes place at the Shack of the Leopold Center.

And we basically finish by talking a lot about policy implementation, legal aspects, and constitutional aspects of lake management. So then we have a core of people who can go out and work in their own community and work with their lake organizations and hopefully try to keep advancing them forward and solving problems. So just this year, we're recruiting our 11th leadership crew. We had 69 nominations from around the state.

We can only fit about 25 people in the boathouse. So we have to kind of somehow winnow that down into the size of crew that's gonna go through this program. We kind of follow up with people It's hard to know unless you can follow each person's story after they graduate and see what they're up to. And we do that in some cases.

But we do survey people just to ask did this training actually help push you further? Did you become more involved in lake management and leadership? The vast majority of people, or 70% roughly, say yes. There's just a small set of people, less than 10%, who say no.

And then there's some people who are still maybe ambivalent. We try to do these surveys on a regular basis just to gauge what direction we need to go with the leadership program. Some other things changed over time. There was a crisis, actually.

Some people in this room might remember what it was like in the state of Wisconsin in the early 1980s. I don't, I grew up in Minnesota, so I was just a kid waiting for the next Star Wars movie. But in the early 1980s, the economy took a bit of a nosedive. There was oil inflation and a broad recession taking place as well as other, like interest rates were crazy high.

The state of Wisconsin was kind of struggling to balance its books, which is probably a story you're used to hearing now. And they decided that this lake program in the early 1980s that it really wasn't worth it. They looked at the money that was being spent in that partnership I was talking about between the lake districts and the state of Wisconsin, and when they audited it and kinda looked at how the money was spent, they found that a great amount of it was being spent on dredging projects. That small lakes that were basically impounded streams in small villages, these would be like your typical millstream type situation, you know.

150 years ago someone built a dam there to power a little flour mill or a saw mill. There's been a lake in this village for a long time and people were upset that this lake has filled in with plants and sediment. And so they said well this is great. Now the DNR's gonna give us half the money we need to dredge this lake out.

The audit looked at that and said, you know what, if you haven't figured out where the sediment, itself, is coming from. If you haven't solved the problems upstream in the watershed, just by dredging, you've subscribed yourself to a long-term expensive dredging maintenance project. That's all you're gonna do. And if we look at all the different little millponds around the state, if this is the type of project we're gonna propagate, we can't afford that.

That's ridiculous, it's not a good use of money. And when that audit came to the governor, he said, you know what, let's nix this program. Those were sort of dark days for the lakes partnership, but they didn't give up. By that point, Lowell and all the other individuals in the lake associations had started some momentum about lake issues.

And they weren't gonna let just this budget deletion stop them. They retrenched. The annual convention kept going on. In fact, it got bigger.

They started to tap into some political powers. They started to invite the governor and other people to come to that annual conference and talk about what really are the issues facing our lakes. And within a few years, just a couple years later, they essentially unveiled a new and reborn Lakes Program that funded, again, many people. Staffed people in the DNR to work on lake issues, it funded the grant program to work with groups, and it also funded this idea of the Citizen Lake Monitoring Network.

We can now fund equipment going out across the state, being entrusted to individual volunteers who would then go out and make recordings of lake water quality. Another thing people might remember about the 80s was Ronald Reagan was our president. And part of Ronald Reagan's appeal to many people was that he pointed out that sometimes government needs to get out of the way and allow people to be part of the solution. Maybe we need to instill more voluntary participation in solving problems that we used to just rely on government to do.

And working with volunteers fit perfectly into that. It was sort of, captured the spirit of the day and said yes, let's go out and train volunteers and leverage them. Because it's true, we won't have enough Wisconsin DNR staff people to even just go out and take all these measurements of lake water quality. So that program started roughly in 1986.

This is just showing you how many volunteers were involved in the program. You can see a pretty linear growth occurring between 1986 and roughly 2012. Going from less than 200 volunteers to now, we're roughly kind of stabilizing out at about 1,000 volunteers. And if you were to figure out sort of if you just looked up the amount of time they spend doing this activity, and calculate a dollar value, this represents about $344,000 just in staff time.

And that doesn't take into account that they're using their own boat, and that they live on the lake. And so the researchers don't have to go out to each lake, these volunteers are right there. This data that's now accruing both in Wisconsin and other states, is useful for researchers like Noah Lottig, here at UW-Madison at the Center for Limnology, where he's taking a look at now many, many tens of thousands of observations of lake water quality and trying to find out well, do we see trends now? Can we really discern that are lakes in Wisconsin getting any better?

Or are they getting worse? Based on all this data that's been put together. And this chart really just shows if you're looking at this map, you can see the blue is basically where all the water bodies are. And then you start covering them up based on the water body, how many years worth of data do we have?

Where the biggest red circles represent somewhere between 11 and 34 years of data. And then the small dots, the black dots and the yellow dots are somewhere between one and six. Wisconsin stands out here. Because we've been doing this longer and more intensively than any of our neighboring states.

And it gives us, I think, a better handle on what's going on with water quality in our lakes. Another thing that happens when you train people to sort of be citizen scientists, to be good keen observers out on the resource, is that we can also work with them to identify plants. They can identify plants that belong in a lake, and maybe plants that don't belong in a lake. This is an example of a plant that doesn't belong in a lake.

I don't imagine anybody in here could recognize what we're looking at. This is the starry stonewort. So you can kinda get a sense of where the name starry stonewort comes from in the sense that this piece of the plant looks somewhat like a star. You can see someone's fingerprint pattern behind it to give you a sense of how small this is.

This is called a bulbil. The starry stonewort is actually an algae. It's a very simple plant. It's an algae that could reproduce sexually if there were males and females in Wisconsin.

Or in the United States. Or in North America. There's not. These guys came over on ballast water from Europe.

And fortunately for us, only the males have made it so far. What that means is that this can only reproduce asexually. Usually it propagates through these bulbils that can store energy and then kinda persist for a little while, and then start producing more growth. Or if, just the plant itself, the algae fragments break up, it can reproduce from that again.

However, if you can find these pieces, if you can be careful about moving these pieces, you can actually prevent this plant from moving from one water body to another. It does not move by ducks. It does not move by fish. It moves by human transmittal through boats and other careless activity.

We're fortunate that it's not sexual because if two algae were to get together and produce offspring, the resulting offspring would actually be so small that there's no way that we could prevent its spread. Because it's asexual, because it can only spread by fragments or these bulbils, we can actually catch it. And it was Citizen Monitors who were able to help detect this out of place plant in southeast Wisconsin just starting two years ago. Now we've identified several lakes in southeast Wisconsin that do have starry stonewort.

Just last year they found a couple of lakes in Minnesota that have the same plant and again, it's clear that it's moving by boat traffic. So, what do we do about that? It was right around 2003 when some folks up in northern Wisconsin said, "You know what? "We're note gonna just sit back "and watch people come with their boats "and maybe they got plants hanging off their boat "and they're just gonna put it in the lake.

"Instead, we wanna be at the landing "and we wanna talk to them about "good boat sanitation practices "and what part boater can play "in preventing the spread of invasive aquatic plants and other species from one water body to another." This is a neat story, because it actually just came out of some high schoolers. Some kids up in northern Wisconsin, they had a good science teacher, and the science teacher inspired in them to apply for a grant. They applied for a grant that was from a foundation in Washington DC. They said what we want to do is we want to provide a kit that any lake organization could use at their landing.

It would have T-shirts that would identify the volunteers, it would have informational packets they could hand out to boaters, and we wanna just propagate this idea, spread around a bunch of volunteers standing at boat landings. And then we, the DNR and UW-Extension and the lake organizations agreed we'd formally create this program called Clean Boats, Clean Waters. Which is a volunteer boat landing monitoring program to try to prevent the spread of invasive species. This data just takes us up to 2014, we actually just finished getting some of the 2015 data together.

What this is showing, is how many boats have been inspected in Wisconsin from 2004 through 2014. You can see that in the very first year that this formal program came out, only 6,000 boats. Well, we only had a couple of landings, we only had so many volunteers. But you can see, again, some pretty dramatic growth up until 2012.

People are very concerned about aquatic invasive species, Eurasian watermilfoil, and zebra mussels, and they wanna do something to try to prevent its spread. And this is basically one of the tools that's available for them to try to prevent infestations, new infestations coming into their lakes. And again, there's just a quantification a rough quantification of the volunteer effort here. I don't think it represents, really, all the value that the volunteers add.

By meeting with recreational boaters at the landing and talking to them. We've actually seen over the same period of time, I'm learning that it's very difficult to really measure these things and to say that you're having an impact. However the rate at which new lakes become infested with aquatic invasive species has slowed in Wisconsin. We aren't seeing the same rate that we saw in the 1990s and the early part of 2000s.

Now, again, it's hard to tease out well is that because all the easily infected lakes are now infected? Or is it because of efforts like this? Is it because of heightened awareness? It's a little bit difficult to say, but we're pleased that the rate has slowed down.

We've also been, All of these volunteers and all these people learning about invasive species has really put the pressure on both the state and federal government to be much more careful about how ballast water is coming into the Great Lakes. Everyone kind of identified that that's really the big open door that's allowing new species from other parts of the planet to come into the Great Lakes. And so we haven't had a new species found in the Great Lakes for several years now. And it's because they've implemented some rules.

The most basic one saying that when an ocean-going vessel is out at sea, it needs to swap out fresh water for saltwater. And usually at that point, all the freshwater species are lost and then as it comes into a freshwater area, it swaps out again, but now it's in a whole different part of the world, so we don't see the same movement of species that we used to see. This next part is sort of like well, where if this is, what I've given you is where the Lakes Partnership has been and where it came from. And now we're starting to ask ourselves both the DNR, UW-Extension, and a lot of our stakeholders, these lake organizations and property owners, what's next?

We've done really good assessments of lake health. Lake water quality and habitat in lakes. The EPA generously funds this type of research and says here's some money, hire some people, go out and just measure just how good your lakes are doing. Because the EPA is interested in How does Wisconsin compare to Minnesota, How does Minnesota compare to Montana, Can we look at sort of all these states and get a state-by-state comparison?

Wisconsin is doing pretty good. We have some of the healthiest lakes, but they're not perfect. And when this assessment is done, we find two big issues. One of them is in-lake habitat.

The pieces of habitat within a lake that we know existed 150 or 200 years ago that are now completely gone. Two big pieces of that are basically coarse woody debris, or trees, that have fallen into a lake and the other one just being aquatic plants. Okay, so in terms of coarse woody debris, humans have gone out into lakes, being sort of, I don't know, aspiring beavers or whatever we are, we go out there, we find all these trees, and we pull them out and we clean up the lakes. We see them as obstructions to recreation.

We think the kids are gonna get hurt on the fallen tree or something. It gets in the way of our boat moving around from one place to another. The teenagers wanna burn it for firewood to have a bonfire. Over the last hundred years, we've systematically pulled out a lot of these trees.

And so when this habitat assessment was done, it's like, wow, many of our lakes are almost completely denuded of these trees that normally would have accrued in the water body. So in-lake habitat. The other one is water quality threats from runoff. There's basically a long-term nutrification, or adding of nutrients taking place on just about every lake that has any level of human activity around it.

Because we've modified the upland landscape to make it drain more efficiently, usually towards the lake or towards the rivers that feed into the lake. Our human interest, unlike beavers, our human interest is getting the water away. To send the water down away from us so that the basement doesn't flood, so there's not ponds in the yard where mosquitoes are gonna breed. So we figure out ways to simplify the landscape and move all the water off of it and in the process, that now rushed water carries with it sediment and nutrients that are gradually but certainly building up in our lakes.

It's a long-term, mostly unseen threat having to do with storm water runoff. And a changing climate, and more dramatic storm events are only gonna make that problem worse and harder to deal with. So what do we do? What we're trying to do is basically come up with a strategy sounds a little crazy, but we wanna work with literally millions of property owners to get them on board with doing good things with the land that they own to protect the health of that lake.

Building off of Lowell's idea that these are the people who have a vested interest and a direct stake in what's going on in that water body, can we now really hold them to the fire and say all right, come on board with us, let's do some good things to protect these lakes. So I'm gonna talk a bit about this idea of a Healthy Lakes program. It's brand new, it just started last year. And it sort of represents, I think, what we could be doing easily for the next couple of decades.

I wanna point out that we're not dealing, necessarily, with sites like this. When I talk about Healthy Lakes, and this new initiative. There's many places that are like this that have very severe erosion problems. These are projects where we need to involve engineers and we need to figure out really what's going on here and how do we fix it.

What I'm talking about are those millions and millions of shoreline properties where people, just being people, and doing what they thought was the social norm have modified the landscape in a way that harms the lake's health. So our practices are really summarized, sort of, in this chart, or in this graphic, showing some things in black and white, and some things in color. You see down here basically what I talked about in terms of coarse woody debris or trees in the water. That's in the lake here.

The riparian zone immediately adjacent to the lake is also critical for in-lake habitat. And a scenario that has been in places like Madison dramatically modified and obliterated and replaced with, maybe, stones, and replaced with bluegrass. So how do we get native plants back in? Up by the house, off to the right, there's a rain garden.

It's a feature that's introduced in order to allow storm water to infiltrate into the ground. And near the driveway and the garage on the left, there's basically a simple interception system to slow down runoff and prevent it from rushing off into the lake. Intercept it and allow it to infiltrate. I'll go through these really quickly.

So, Fish Sticks is what we're calling this introduced coarse woody material. You cannot just go around and start cutting down trees right adjacent to the lake. Number one, there's rules against that. Number two, that would defeat the purpose.

Instead, you have to find upland trees and then bring them down to the lake typically in the winter is the time you can do this bring it out on the frozen ice. You can see in this graphic, they become cabled together and then they become cabled to the shore so that you don't have trees just sort of floating out into the water body. These are going to be staying exactly where we want them to. This is different than-- Some people are familiar with the concept of a fish crib or just some sort of underwater structure that fish, maybe adult fish, like to hang out in.

This piece of lake ecosystem allows all the insects and all the small fish to actually survive in a lake that are the basis of the food web. So this is an important piece, and it's not the same as fish cribs. If you're gonna put them in, that area where they're gonna be attached to the shore, you can't just have a bunch of rocks and turf grass there, you have to have a native planting there. This is just showing some folks out on Pewaukee Lake in Waukesha County doing a fish stick project.

Again, it's much easier to do in the winter. This is what it might look like, if you know. Again, we're just hoping to get some interesting coarse woody material that has small branches. It'll break down over time, that's kind of how nature would have done things on its own.

The other part is just getting people to restore their shores. The DNR has been trying for decades to try to get people to restore shores. But their program previously said you know, if you wanna do this, we want you to basically do the whole thing. We're only going to partner with you and give you funding if you fully restore your shoreland.

And we need you to sign a permanent deed restriction that prevents the shoreland planting from being removed. Those two features basically made most people back away. They said, I'm not gonna do a giant plant restoration project and you want me to sign a deed restriction? So instead, we've given people a much smaller piece that they can work on.

We'll give them some money to restore to put some plants in, we'll cost share this and try to get people to start small. Start with, you know, 350 feet actually isn't that small if you've ever done some restoration in your backyard or gardening. But it's still much smaller than a full 150 ft piece of shoreline. We've gone so far as to come up with different designs.

Through the last couple of decades we've figured out sort of which plants work and which plants don't work in what types of soils in which parts of the state. And so we've come up with really a good list, I think, of plant material that people should be working with. We want them to be successful. To give you a sense of, again, the scale that we're looking at, here's just a sort of prototypical shoreland home we're trying to show here's roughly a 10 by 35 foot block.

We're not saying put this right next to the pier where there's a lot of foot traffic anyway. Maybe look for a place where there's already some erosion going on, so you can attenuate that while you're working on it. But here's maybe about the scale of what we wanna do. This is one of our first examples.

This is from, this is now about a year and a half ago. Again, this would have been just turf grass coming down to the beach, and instead we're getting a mixture of many different native plants. You in this picture, the fencing and that's critical to keep deer out of this. In many parts of the state deer are in such large numbers and they're so hungry and they love just coming in to newly planted projects and eating up hundreds of dollars worth of plants.

So, the fencing is worth it in those cases. I mentioned the simple diversion. This is not rocket science. This is just a matter of, you know, if you had this driveway going down towards the lake, towards the home there, in a big storm event all that storm water's gonna just go along those ruts and head right down and carry all the sediment with it.

Why not put in a fairly low tech diversion in order to push the water off to the side and allow it to infiltrate. This'll be a cost-shareable activity with the DNR. Similarly, if you have a garage out there you don't have a basement under it you can create some people call these french drains this is just an infiltration area where the storm water is coming off the roof, you don't even need a gutter system, it's just gonna go into the rocks. And then infiltrate into the ground instead of becoming part of the storm water heading down towards the lake.

An even more simple application, here the driveway is paved. That's fine, the storm water, you can even see how it works, because there's some sand and stuff left from a recent storm. But it's basically pushing it into this little infiltration area so that, again, it can more easily soak into the ground. And not run off across the grass, join more runoff, and then eventually get into the lake.

And Rain Gardens. People in Dane County hopefully are familiar with rain gardens now, 'cause these have been promoted pretty hard here in Dane County for about 10 years. This is just creating, again, a divot type of garden. Digging out an area, filling it in with some compost an good soil, and then chucking a bunch of deep-rooted native plants in there that'll again help infiltrate storm water instead of putting it out into the system that ends up in the lakes and rivers.

This is an example of a rain garden installed kind of between the house and the lake you can see. And again, they had to modify the landscape a little bit to create this divot. That's great, you know, what we've done for the last 150 years is modify the landscape to get rid of the divots and to make it more simple. So what we're doing is trying to atone for past sins and fix things and make things work better for the health of the lake.

So, first round of this were able to touch about 48 different properties around the state. This is based on a competitive grant application process that really leverages the lake partnership because we're not asking individual property owners to submit a grant application, instead, we're asking those lake associations the lake districts, also counties can apply for this and basically say yeah, we think we have a bunch of people now who wanna cooperate and work on this, so help us cost-share some of these projects and let's get 'em rolling. So a hundred practices, one year. You know, how long is it gonna take to get to a million?

(whistles) If we stick at 100 per year, it's gonna take forever to get to a million. I'm never gonna get there, right? What we're hoping this will become is a new social norm around lakes. And so we're actually working with people like Bret Shaw, who's a community based social marketing researcher here at UW-Madison.

We're working with other people who are sort of social science and marketing specialists to figure out ways that we can take this idea and start promoting it in such a way that it becomes the new norm. That it just becomes a new practice. Right now around lakes, the norm is to have that manicured lawn down to the grass. It's ready to be photographed from the lake so it can show up in a brochure in a magazine that's selling lakeshore properties.

That's what we have. What we need are these healthier properties that actually help out the lake. And we think we can get there. We think that we've lowered some of the barriers to participation, these first couple hundred projects are gonna be sort of planting the seed and getting things started.

And hopefully showing people that this doesn't-- We're not asking them to reverse their world views. We're not asking them to totally turn everything upside down. These should be pretty simple steps that they could take. And it isn't terribly expensive.

We're talking about $81,000 in state money distributed to these projects, and local money bringing that total up to about 126. So this is, this is a cheap program. That could scale, right? If it only cost me $81,000 to do this, I can easily do ten times as much at $810,000 right?

So that's where we wanna be. But we don't think that the state is gonna be funding this forever. We think that in the future 10-20 years down the line, the state will be able to wean its piece of the investment off because of that local norm. Because people just start doing it because everybody else has been doing it and now our lakes are responding.

So, what I've given you is just a taste of what we're up to with the Wisconsin Lakes Partnership. Again, it's about a 40-year project right now. I was sitting down with some people and thinking about this just today, and we were thinking like 40 years, that's really not that long in the grand scheme of these lakes, it's really not that long in terms of states and nations. This project, somehow the Lakes Partnership, really is hopefully gonna be at some point a 200-year story a 300-year story and I think that's possible because the people in Wisconsin have that personal investment in these water bodies.

That's a critical variable though. One of my concerns, I guess, as a professional is that lakeshore property and these cabins become more and more an exclusive domain. A place where only a fraction of the population gets out to recreate. And if that happens, if the vast majority of people in Wisconsin have no personal connection to a lake, they've never swam in one, never played in a beach, then I think that's really the threat that could undercut this whole thing.

So we're also looking at ways to try to ensure that there's continuing public access to these lakes. And the DNR is a great partner, believe it or not, in that. So I'm excited about the future and I'm open to taking questions. I thank you all for listening to this tale.

(applause)