Watershed-Based Lake Protection Strategies in Minnesota: Measuring How Far the Needle has Moved toward the Goal.

Local water management is a complex, yet critical part of the water management framework in Minnesota.  Passage of Minnesota’s Clean Water, Land and Legacy Constitutional Amendment in 2008 provided an opportunity for additional resources to be directed at water quality protection as well as restoration activities.  The additional funding also provided a challenge in that Minnesota citizens expected much more accountability and implementation activities that were Prioritized, Targeted and, most of all, Measurable. 

Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes over 10 acres in size, but 10 counties in north central Minnesota contain 4,500 of them.  The good news is that water quality in most of these lakes still meets state water quality standards for pollutants, however this high water quality cannot be taken for granted.  We applied a science-based water quality framework for systematically analyzing and translating watershed characteristics into a risk-based methodology that establishes a readily comprehensible, actionable land use disturbance threshold beyond which water quality is projected to decline. This framework and the relative risk of land use change is being successfully implemented and the end result is that Minnesota watershed protection will be much more intentional and quantifiable.