How do we save South’s lakes?
ONE of two keynote speakers at a meeting being held in Wanaka tonight to discuss the health of the alpine lakes and how to save them claims the big Southern Lakes are a ‘‘management blindspot’’.
New Zealand Freshwater Sciences Society president and University of Otago professor Dr Marc Schallenberg said there was a lack of knowledge about the lakes because of a chronic lack of investment in research and monitoring which had led to ‘‘regional water plans doing the minimum required to safeguard the lakes.’’
He said a concerted research effort was needed to understand how vulnerable the large lakes were to the many and varied pressures they faced, or New Zealand risked making the same mistakes as North America and Europe in allowing their large lakes to degrade.
‘‘This would have serious consequences for New Zealand’s reputation as a relatively unspoiled country, upon which our tourism industry and many of our food export industries rely,’’ he said.
Tonight’s meeting, dubbed ‘‘Saving our lakes — what we can do?’’, being held in the Lake Wanaka Centre, was organised by the Wanaka Branch of the Royal Society to meet the growing public concern on the water quality and ecosystems of the lakes.
Otago Regional Council resource science manager Dr Dean Olsen agreed there was a ‘‘perceived lack of monitoring’’ of the lakes and said he intended to address those concerns at the meeting.
He said water in Southern alpine lakes contained very low amounts of nutrients and until recently the technology to monitor changes in lownutrient water was not available. However, since September 2015 the ORC had been monitoring water quality monthly at three sites in Lake Wanaka, three in Lake Wakatipu and one site in Lake Hawea.
‘‘We’re also funding Landcare Research to find out whether the algae Cyclotella bodanica that causes ‘‘lake snow’’ is native or not, as that would help us determine whether, like didymo, lownutrient water allowed it to thrive,’’ he said.
Other panel members will include Queenstown Lakes District Council chief engineer Ulrich Glasner and representatives from the Department of Conservation, Catchments Otago Research Group, Ministry for the Environment, Fish and Game, Guardians of the Lakes and Linz.
The meeting in the Lake Wanaka Centre begins at 7.30pm and admission is free.
kerrie.waterworth@odt.co.nz