Environmental scientist Dr. Peter Sale believes a recently-released state of the Muskoka watershed report, outlining a decrease in water quality in hundreds of lakes, could have widespread implications on lake health in Haliburton County.
The Muskoka Watershed Council released the report in September, providing a scientific assessment of the watershed’s overall health. Typically produced every five years, the document looks at local water and land conditions and provides the basis of the council’s priorities for future watershed management.
While the bulk of the watershed’s 2,000plus lakes are located within the District of Muskoka, there are some that stretch into Algonquin Highlands. Sale said since the County is so close to Muskoka, some of the things being seen there are likely happening here.
“Our environment is changing, but it’s changing slowly enough that most people probably don’t notice it. This makes it a very difficult problem to deal with as we’re not having catastrophes, emergencies, we’re having slow degradation,” Sale told The Highlander.
“Because Haliburton County is directly east of us, it’s very likely the kinds of patterns we’re seeing here are repeated,” Sale added. “Some are driven by development, which may be more intense here, but many are being driven by things like road management and climate change… this is valuable information for people in Haliburton, because it will help direct you towards things that should be looked at [in your] watershed.”
A look at some trends
One of the most significant changes, Sale said, is the decline of calcium concentration in lake waters. Just over a quarter, or 28 per cent, of 187 lakes dipped below a threshold of two milligrams per litre – which is problematic for keystone species like zooplankton.
“We’re getting to the point where many organisms that live in the lakes can’t build their skeletons because they don’t get enough calcium. The environment is becoming hostile to species that are supposed to be there,” Sale said.
If the trend continues, species like zooplankton could see their population levels massively deplete, causing ripple effects up the food chain. “They feed fish, which then feed water birds… the functioning of a lake can be hugely disrupted if any of those links is not performing effectively,” Sale noted.
The Muskoka watershed has also seen an increase in blue green algae blooms, with five cases reported in 2022.
Another major negative, he notes, is 70 per cent of monitored lakes are saltier now than they used to be. In about a quarter of those, the concentration is high enough that it’s impacting the survival of dozens of natural species.
“We are importing tons of salt every year and spreading it on our roads. When it washes off the roads, it runs through the soils in our forests and into our lakes,” he said. “There’s a simple solution – we just need to find a way of taking care of our winter roads without dumping salt on them.”
Climate change is having an impact. Sale said changes in rainfall patterns have amounted to a month more of rainy days annually compared to 100 years ago. There is also evidence storms are becoming more intense – double the systems yielded more than 51 millimetres of rain between 2019 than from 1970 to 1999.
Lakes in Muskoka are also experiencing about 20 fewer days of ice cover than in the mid-1970s
“That has consequences for people who like to ice fish, snowmobile, for the construction industry, and winter tourism. It also has significant consequences for the environment because those lakes are open now 20 more days per year for evaporation, and for the water to warm,” Sale said. “As a result, our lakes are different kinds of systems to what they were before. That’s likely to continue as climate change intensifies.”
Time to act
Sale said watersheds across the province stand at a crucial turning point – while they may be healthy now, existing management systems seem incapable of halting or reversing the negative trends outlined in the report.
The solution, he believes, is an integrated watershed management system where all communities work together to identify and deal with pressing issues as they arise.
There needs to be some significant changes to the way we manage the environment… we are working directly with municipalities, trying to bring them to the table and get them organized as a consortium to introduce a new type of adaptive management process based on monitoring the environment and responding to the changes while they’re still small enough that it won’t be hugely expensive and arduous,” Sale said.
“It’s a completely different way of looking at things, but it’s something we need to do across the board in Ontario,” he added.
“The current system where one government agency is responsible for keeping the roads clean but doesn’t have any responsibility over what happens along the edges of a road… was developed at a time when the world was a simpler place, the environment was not changing very rapidly, and our development was low scale. We’re in a totally different world now,” Sale said.
These problems are not going to go away by themselves. They’re only going to get worse if we don’t deal with them… We’ve always been able to say our environment is in pretty good shape – it still is, but it’s getting worse every year,” he added. “Now is the time to change the way we do things before it’s too late.”
