Guest Blog By Terry R. Gronwall, Chairman of the Honeoye Lake Watershed Task Force (Honeoye, NY)
Honeoye Lake is one of the smaller (~1,800 acres) Finger Lakes in Upstate New York. We have been managing our macrophyte population by using a harvester for about 25 years. The objective of our harvesting program is to both provide relief for the recreational lake users and to remove biomass containing phosphorus from the lake every summer. We average around 800 wet tons of biomass removed per season.
When we learned about ciBiobase we saw this service as a way to make our macrophyte harvesting operation more efficient by concentrating our efforts on areas in the lake that have macrophytes growing through most of the water column. This is shown as the red zone on our macrophyte maps. We plan to monitor our actual harvesting rates relative to our macrophyte maps over the summer harvesting season to see if we achieve our goal of increased productivity.
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| Aquatic plant harvester in operation on Honeoye Lake in the Finger Lake District of New York. |
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| Aquatic plant biovolume heat maps created via automated cloud-based processing with BioBase. Citizens passively recorded sonar and gps data to a Lowrance Elite 7 HDI on Honeoye Lake. Multiple files were uploaded from a SD card in the unit to BioBase and merged to create the uniform maps displayed above. |
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| Tri-panel image showing transect coverage (left) and resultant bathymetric map (middle) and bottom hardness maps (right) produced simultaneously along with vegetation maps in BioBase |
Our 2014 pilot ciBioBase program is being funded by an Ontario County Water Resources Council Grant.
