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The Fond du
Lac Environmental Program’s Office of Water Protection includes the
staff and programs responsible for protecting the aquatic resources
of the Reservation: surface waters (lakes and streams), wetlands,
and ground water. These resources are substantial: over 3000 acres
of lakes, 96 miles of streams, and 44,000 acres of wetlands, which
support traditional hunting, fishing and gathering activities of
band members. The Reservation has been granted “Treatment as an
Affected State” or “TAS” authority for administering its water
quality program, and in December 2001, was notified that our tribal
water quality standards were formally approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. These standards include special designated uses such as fishing,
recreation, wild rice and wildlife defined for 24 lakes and 8
streams within the boundaries of the Reservation, and form the basis
for protecting Fond du Lac’s lakes, streams and wetlands. Most of
the funding for this base water quality program - staff, monitoring,
equipment, contractual work - comes from U.S. EPA Region 5 (http://www.epa.gov/owow/),
which provides financial and technical support to the tribes in
Region 5 just as they do for the states.
Since 1998,
we have been monitoring these waters
(see above photos) to determine if they are indeed “healthy” and able
to support the types of aquatic communities (algae and macrophytes,
zooplankton and benthic macroinvertebrates, both cold and
warm-water fishes) that we would expect to see in lakes and streams
in northern Minnesota. We measure such parameters as
temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity, turbidity, total
dissolved solids, color, total hardness, alkalinity, nutrients
(various forms of nitrogen and phosphorus required by algae for
growth and reproduction), and transparency. In lakes specifically identified
as wild rice waters, we also look at the nutrients available in the
sediments for the rice plants to take up, and sulfate, which may
inhibit rice growth. Once a year, we screen all our lakes for a
list of harmful heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, chloride,
chromium, copper, lead, nickel, selenium, and zinc.
In addition to
doing this physical and chemical monitoring, we also sample the
aquatic biological communities: periphyton or attached algae,
benthic macroinvertebrates (organisms such as aquatic larval
insects, snails, scuds, mussels) and fish in the streams;
phytoplankton or floating algae, macrophytes or rooted plants, and
zooplankton (“water fleas”) in the lakes. When possible, we include
fish community information from our fisheries program or the
Minnesota DNR for our lakes. We perform many of the measurements
and analyses ourselves, either in the field or in our environmental
laboratory; other samples are sent out to local laboratories to be
analyzed. All of this water quality data is used to report on the
condition of our Reservation waters,
determine any trends in water quality over the seasons or years, and
identify lakes and streams that may need restoration or extra
protection.
Water Quality
Report 305b
(this report is in PDF format
and requires Adobe Acrobat to view)
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