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Pearls of Wisdom Offered About Maine Lakes

August 11, 2009 - People have many questions about lakes in Maine:

• "Is the water in Dedham's Green Lake very green?" (No.)

• "How does water clarity in Farmington's Clearwater Lake compare to Poland's Mud Pond?" (Clearwater Lake is about twice as clear as Mud Pond.)

• "What has been happening to water transparency in "my" lake over the past 30 years?" (It depends on the lake.)

• "At what elevations are chain pickerel found in Maine?" (Less than 1,000 feet.)

Questions about Maine lakes can be answered by consulting information found at the PEARL Web site (www.pearl.maine.edu).

For more than a decade, Public Educational Access to Resources on Lakes has provided lakes data to the general public, students, researchers and resource managers across North America and beyond (a recent inquiry about crayfish data came from the Czech Republic).

PEARL is managed from the Sen. George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research at the University of Maine in Orono. Annual updates to the lake water-quality data are collected by Department of Environmental Protection lakes biologists, and an army of enthusiastic and capable volunteers affiliated with the Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program (www.mainevolunteerlakemonitors.org).

In PEARL, you can browse through the list of data tables in the system by category: water quality, fauna, flora, etc. Alternatively, you can focus on a particular lake and see what information is available for that water body.

Once at a lake's page, you have access to several "visualization" and reporting tools. For example, you can request a chart that displays the annual trend in lake water clarity, called the "Secchi depth."

Other options include a summary table of water-quality data; lists of fish and mussel species present in the lake, and whether the lake hosts any invasive aquatic plant species. Note that these reporting tools are "dynamic" -- the charts and summary tables reflect the most recent version of the data in the system.

Other sections of PEARL contain information summaries compiled a few years ago as part of Maine's Aquatic Biodiversity Project. There are species distribution maps for fish, amphibians and reptiles, crayfish, mussels, dragonflies and damselflies, and several other invertebrate groups, including chironomids and mayflies.

Over the past several years, PEARL has grown considerably to better serve the needs of its users.

It is now evolving again. A new "Lakes of Maine" Web site will be released later this year.

It will provide even more convenient access to a greater library of information about Maine lakes – data, documents, information summaries and data visualizations.

The new site will use both Google Earth and an even easier-to-use version of Google Maps – one that is based on a mapping system recently developed for biodiversity data at Acadia National Park.

With this new Web site, PEARL will be even more useful in answering your questions about the lakes of Maine.

This column was submitted by Peter Vaux, an associate research professor with the Sen. George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research at the University of Maine.

E-mail your PEARL questions to peter.vaux@maine.edu or send them to "In Our Backyard," Maine DEP, 17 State House Station, Augusta, ME 04333.

PETER VAUX / IN OUR BACKYARD, Portland Press Herald, August 5, 2009


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