In March of 2023, the Lake Champlain Fish and Wildlife Management Cooperative – a working group of fisheries professionals from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – announced plans to halve the annual stocking of lake trout in Lake Champlain this year. It's a response to recent increases in wild recruitment, or survival past the first winter of life, of lake trout. While thousands of animal populations across taxa around the world plummet, the native lake trout of Lake Champlain are making a comeback. Why?
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The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age have come and gone, and some scientists say that we are now living in the Plastic Age. Major bans of single-use plastics, including many single-use EPS products, became law in Vermont in 2019 and New York in 2022. While the bans on single-use plastics including EPS foams were major steps in curbing plastic pollution, there is one type of EPS foam that doesn’t just end up in the lake, but is purposefully put in the lake by design: dock foam. Read...
Since the time of European settlement, Vermont has lost half of its wetlands in the Champlain Basin to development and agriculture, and more than a third of wetlands that existed statewide.1 Wetlands are known by a lot of different names – swamps, marshes, peatlands, sloughs, bogs, fens, and potholes, among others – and are a critical part of Vermont’s landscape. Read...
When road salt dissolves, it needs to go somewhere—and in the Lake Champlain Basin, it winds up making our lake a bit saltier, which is bad news for freshwater life. Read...
The $37.8 billion Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2022 was passed overwhelmingly by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Biden in December. WRDA is biennial legislation that authorizes flood control, navigation, and ecosystem restoration projects for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE). With a $37.8 billion budget, the 2022 version is the largest WRDA in history. In addition to providing authorization for the ACOE to undertake water resources infrastructure projects to address flooding, water transportation, and ecosystem restoration, the bill includes provisions to support underserved communities and address climate change.
WRDA aims to strengthen water restoration, waterway resiliency, invasive species management, and emergency flood protection by channeling more funds and resources to the ACOE for risk management studies and new projects. Key provisions that will help Lake Champlain are outlined below. Read...
Though the days are just starting to lengthen in this new year, winter’s hold on Lake Champlain has really just begun. Lake Champlain does what all water does in cold enough temperatures—it freezes. When record keeping on Lake Champlain freezing began in the 19th century, it was rare for a winter to go by without a complete freeze-over from shore to shore of the lake. This regular freezing created the basis for a seasonal culture of ice-centered activities. Icy activities have been a part of life in the Lake Champlain basin for generations untold, but freezing frequency is expected to plummet due to climate change. Read...
Calling All Paddlers’ – We Want Your Pictures! LCC is seeking boating pictures to enhance our 2023 edition of the Paddlers’ Trail guidebook. If you ventured out on the water with a camera in the past year or two, please consider sharing some photos with us. We are looking for images of human-powered adventures on Lake Champlain and any discoveries made along the way. Scenes of paddling with friends (all wearing PFDs of course), packing your gear, fishing from your boat, taking in a sunrise or sunset, and other visual reflections of water outings are welcome. Read...
While Lake Champlain is not as cold or icy this winter as it has been in winters of yore, it is still not a place for a casual swim at this time of year. This inaccessibility gives the depths of the lake a certain mystery. What is going on underneath the dark surface of Lake Champlain as winter unfolds? How do fish hunker down and survive what seems to be a hostile environment of icy cold water all season long?
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LCC and partners of the Champlain Basin Education Initiative (CBEI), a community of organizations engaged in watershed education, will host Watershed for Every Classroom (WEC), a year-long professional development program for interdisciplinary teams of K-12 teachers in the Lake Champlain Basin.
WEC is like camp for teachers! Participants travel the Basin, visit farms, paddle waterways, explore mountain tops, tour urban areas, and much more! The program helps educators enrich their curricula with local, relevant and engaging topics while addressing national standards and district expectations. Participants network with teachers from around the Basin in Québec, New York and Vermont and meet with Basin scientists, historians, and stewards who work in watershed protection. Read...
Changes in precipitation patterns from climate change is fueling cyanobacteria blooms on multiple fronts. Learn about how soil management can help. Read...
After a warm start to the season, it is finally starting to look--and certainly feel--like winter in the Lake Champlain Basin. To make walking and driving safer in this icy season, state and municipal road crews salt roadways. This practice started in the 1930s, when cars became more commonplace and roads needed winter maintenance. Since then, the annual use of road salts in the US has increased—in the past 45 years, the amount has tripled—to a yearly estimated total of 25 million metric tons.
All of this salt has to go somewhere. When in contact with the water, salt dissolves into its ion building blocks, the most common of which are sodium and chloride. The now salty water first washes off roads, stoops, parking lots, and sidewalks, and it can kill adjacent vegetation quickly, as these species are rarely adapted to high salinity. Salty water then either seeps into groundwater or flows through waterways, winding up in larger reservoirs like Lake Champlain. Chloride concentrations in Lake Champlain and its tributaries have been steadily rising for the past several decades. Read...
