Megan Miller
Cumberland Times-News
Oakland —
OAKLAND — Data on the health of Deep Creek Lake has been collected by various organizations from as early as the 1980s, but has never been assembled into one comprehensive report on the lake’s overall condition.
Local conservation group Friends of Deep Creek Lake is hoping to change that as soon as this fall, with the lake’s first-ever ecosystem health report card.
The organization announced its plan Saturday, at a forum called “State of the Watershed.” More than 100 people attended the three-hour event, including Sen. George Edwards, Delegate Wendell Beitzel and Secretary John Griffin of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
To create the report card, Friends of Deep Creek Lake enlisted the help of EcoCheck, a team affiliated with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The project will be funded by a grant from the Chesapeake Bay Trust.
EcoCheck has previously developed report cards for the Chesapeake Bay, Chester River, South River, Magothy River and other watershed areas in the state.
Dr. Heath Kelsey, a science integrator with the organization, said the report card will factor in things like land-use patterns, watershed boundaries and available data from testing conducted by multiple agencies. Those include the Center for Watershed Protection, Maryland Biological Stream Survey, Stream Waders, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the Maryland Department of the Environment.
Kelsey said the plan is to divide the Deep Creek watershed into three separate regions — the northern lake and Marsh Run, the middle lake and the southern lake. But the plan isn’t yet set in stone.
“These are our initial thoughts,” Kelsey said. “We’re very much in the initial stages of this process and need to get some input from the community on how best to do this.”
In addition to “grading” the lake, the report card will include suggestions of things property owners can do to improve the watershed’s scores.
Typically, report cards are published annually and provide a way to monitor changes in a watershed over time.
Some new studies to gather additional data on the lake are also kicking off in the coming months. DNR plans to collect data on aquatic vegetation in the lake, and MDE will begin data collection in late summer and fall 2010 on possible phosphorous problems.
Sources of phosphorous could include septic systems, crop fertilizers and animals in pastureland.
“Whenever we find the source of the nutrients causing the problem, the compliance people will come in and require changes,” said Tony Allred, natural resources planner with MDE.
If septic systems are found to be part of a problem, extending public sewage could be a solution, he said.
“It’s a suspected source,” he said of the septic systems. “We can’t categorically say it at this point because we haven’t done the monitoring that we need to do to say that.”
Allred said MDE might request some homeowners to allow dye injection studies of septic systems to help with pinpointing sources.
Contact Megan Miller at mmiller@times-news.com.
