Water Level Ecology in the Northwoods

Water makes our Planet Earth. Frozen, vapor, or liquid water determines what and where organisms survive. Weather follows water around the globe from our oceans to land and back again. Water creates a crisis after crisis. Droughts and floods. Feast and famine. Peace and war. This is how it affects man’s actions with or without human ingenuity or interference. But over time humanity has disrupted the natural cycles of Planet Earth. We are now focused on climate change disruptions of nature even without understanding local manmade actions that collectively make climate change even more disruptive. We must come up to speed on what I call water level ecology.

The Northwoods in 150 years have gone from a pristine wilderness of intact forest and pristine lakes to disrupted ecosystems. Human development of course, was without an understanding ecological connection of water and biological diversity that we now have knowledge of. We have built dams in the name of commerce, developed waterways for commerce and recreation, and polluted them viewing it as a waste assimilator. The phrase “the solution to pollution” ,whether in the water, soil, or in the air, has now distributed toxins throughout all affecting the organisms that live and depend on each.

To counter these disruptions in nature we now have a plethora of laws whether it be statutory at the state and/or federal level or in the form of zoning ordinances at the county and town levels. We have environmental methods to quantify and document these disruptions through government programs and universities, but little success at correcting these crises. We perhaps need a new way to approach these problems.

For example, if we look at the effect of dams on lakes and waterways, the problems they create ecologically are immense. The two ecological inventories that we can explore on the effects of a dam would be data bases we have created for water quality and fisheries assessments. The new question is how do we explain these effects simply for citizens to take action to solve them? If we take a historical perspective of the dam and its operation over time and document the changes in these two aspects of the ecology, we will find they are all connected. Environmental education makes us aware of nature, laws are meant to protect what we have learned. An environmental ethic moves the understanding of nature to do what is right personally and through community action to preserve and restore what nature has created . Understanding the effects of dams is the first step into restoring an aquatic ecosystem.

This is the direction of the Walleye Restoration Foundation, Inc. We have chosen Vilas, Oneida, and Iron Counties as pilots for this new way of thinking in aquatic resource management. These are headwater areas of major watersheds in Wisconsin: the Wisconsin, Chippewa, and the Presque Isle rivers . These systems are the home of the most studied fish in the Upper Midwest – the walleye. The lakes and waterways in this area still have pristine water quality with a related data base. The time is now for a restoration approach using these data bases and the ecological principles that have been developed over the last 75 years. Water hydrology and water levels in the waters of the Northwoods and the Canadian Sheild are what makes this area walleye and lake country. Help us keep it that way!