We congratulate Metro News on your superb article in the Tuesday edition of November 09, 2010. Since this is supposed to be in the form of a letter rather than a treatise on professional lake management, we will summarize it but provide select web links to our numerous web pages, some scientific, and some general. Clicking on the underlined words will launch the relevant web pages.

Over the last 25 years, we have been concerned about the degradation in the water quality of not only certain urbanized and urbanizing lakes within the present HRM (Halifax Regional Municipality) area but also across our beloved Nova Scotia.

As mostly volunteers with varied scientific backgrounds, we carried out some advanced scientific research which falls under the umbrella of Applied Limnology as follows: We carried out Predictive Modelling of several parameters in one thousand five hundred (1,500) lakes and ponds in four (4) counties of Nova Scotia; studied the phytoplankton assemblages for early warning signals; of latterly, we have been concentrating in the ever important studies of zoobenthos (the organisms present in the bottom sediments); on chironomid mentum deformities (this is quite specialized and looks at the cumulative effects of multiple stressors); and to a lesser degree in phytobenthos (algal composition in the bottom sediments).

On occasions, we also send `reference collections’ to leading worldwide authorities for independent peer reviews!

With our predictive modelling of multiple parameters, we were able to even predict issues prior to their manifestation, for e.g., the increasing weed growth in several Dartmouth area lakes which has indeed raised the concerns of numerous general stakeholders. As a very recent example, see the case of Lakes Banook and MicMac (media article of September 09, 2010).

We had indeed forewarned the HRM (Cc’d the Province as always) a few years ago about the impending possibility via atleast five (5) detailed emails.

There is little point in crying after‑the‑fact; the whole idea is to work on prevention as solutions can be quite costly and not permanent as proven time and time again elsewhere in the world where they spend hundreds of millions of dollars (200 of our associate‑scientists live in the USA and elsewhere, and they caution us on too much optimism as most claims of `restoration’ have never been proven in the long term)!

We have continuously appraised our Provincial Environment Dept., as well as the present HRM, the former City of Dartmouth, and the former Halifax County.

At one time, we had also written detailed scientific letters to two formers ministers of the federal agency, Environment Canada, namely the Hon. Jean Charest and the Hon. Shiela Copps. Both were courteous but they made it abundantly clear that management/protection of freshwater lakes in Nova Scotia was the total responsibility of the Province of Nova Scotia in partnership with the municipalities.

We are primarily a scientific society of approx. 400 associates out of which 200 are domiciled across Nova Scotia.

Thank you all for reading and thanks for Metro News in publishing it!

(Clicking on the underlined words will launch the relevant web pages)

Shalom M. Mandaville Post-Grad Dip., Professional Lake Manage.

“Narrative on Water Quality”;  “Our sampling protocols, in brief”;  and a 30-minute video on "Environmental Impact on Water Courses” in WMV format!

Chair, Soil & Water Conservation Society of Metro Halifax-(Homepage), a multi-discipline scientific/technical stakeholder group

Email transmissions cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept any liability for errors or omissions in the contents of this message that arise as a result of email transmissions. If verification is required please request a hard copy version.