by Adam Hinterthuer
Every summer, droves of lake-loving tourists and Northwoods residents are drawn to the shores of Crystal Lake in Vilas County. This summer, Katie Hein, Trout Lake Station’s Wisconsin Idea research scientist, will be joining them. But Hein won’t be headed to the oval-shaped waterbody for its sandy beaches and clear water. She, and her crew of undergraduate summer field technicians, will be kicking off a study focused on the connections between land and lakes.
“We know that shoreline habitat destruction is bad for lakes,” Hein explains. “What we don’t have so much information on is on bringing shoreline habitat back.”
Shoreline development can have a number of impacts on a lake. Among other things, it can increase erosion, which adds sediment to a lake and results in murkier waters. It can remove aquatic vegetation important for lake-dwelling insects, juvenile fish, and other important parts of the food web. Hein wants to understand how much shoreline restoration it takes to begin to see recovery from these impacts. And, thanks to some old conservation efforts, Crystal Lake is a great place to ask that question.
“Researchers at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) and Michigan Tech University did some big restoration projects [in the Northwoods] 10 to 15 years ago,” Hein says. One of those projects was along a large piece of the Crystal Lake shoreline that was, essentially, a mowed clearing underneath a grove of mature pine trees.
The researchers, Hein says, began to restore natural vegetation and the understory on that section of the lake shore and fenced the area off to keep deer from eating their plantings. More than a decade later, the area is now a thicket of grass, brush, trees and other native plants. The broader plan involved restoration efforts on three other lakes in the area but, unfortunately, the program fell victim to dramatic budget cuts at the WDNR during the state’s previous gubernatorial administration. And that meant there was no follow up on what the results of these restoration efforts were.
Now, Hein is excited to pick up where they left off and see if she can start piecing the puzzle back together.
“If you have a lake with a ton of developed shoreline and you just restore a little piece on one person’s property, do you start to get something back, or is it not really enough to do anything?” she asks.
It’s not a rhetorical question, either. The WDNR has a “Healthy Lakes” grant program that helps fund restoration projects on individual parcels of land but, the results can be “very piecemeal,” Hein says. “Sometimes it’s just one person volunteering to do it on their property on one lake.”
It’s important to get answers on the impacts of these restoration efforts, because scientists and resource managers can then set goals for the amount of shoreline that needs to be protected or restored to keep our lakes healthy. And these kinds of benchmarks, Hein says, go a long way to creating successful management plans.
“It’s hard to keep momentum if you’re not really aiming for anything,” she says.
For this summer at least, the aim will be on building back the momentum that was lost, and starting to see if the old shoreline restoration efforts on Crystal Lake are paying off.