Your influences can have a huge impact on shorelines. We believe daily actions by all individuals help to preserve the water in lakes and rivers. Shoreline landowners in particular can play a significant role.Visit the interactive site »
Our Love Your Lake program will assess the health of your lake and encourage lakefront residents to take stewardship action. Love Your Lake provides resources and training to local organizations, which enables them to deliver engaging and effective programs to help landowners protect and restore their shorelines, benefitting the property and improving the health of their lake and wildlife habitat.
This peer-reviewed program is standardized for use in Ontario. In the future, the program will be rolled out across Canada for a consistent approach to evaluating shorelines and reaching shoreline property owners. Love Your Lake is a modified and updated version of a scientific protocol developed by MAPLE (Mutual Association for the Protection of Lake Environments) in the 1980s.
Love Your Lake Includes:
- A peer reviewed method for shoreline evaluation focussing on human impacts and the degree of impact on the lake, documented on a property level
- An online database for data entry and evaluation
- Shoreline report templates for individual property reports for landowners
- Access to support including staff, contact management and materials for program delivery
- Evaluations to track the impacts of voluntary stewardship activities
- Training in the use of protocol including how to classify a shoreline, and how property owners can carry out stewardship recommendations
- Individualized reports for every property on the lake with detailed stewardship suggestions for each
- Communications methods for connecting with your landowners, partners, lake associations and more
Why Healthy Shorelines and Lakes Are Important:
Shorelines are some of the most ecologically productive places on Earth. They support plants, microorganisms, insects, amphibians, birds, mammals and fish. Did you know that the first 10 to 15 metres of land surrounding lakes and rivers is responsible for 90 per cent of lake life born, raised and fed in these areas? In addition, these areas are up to 500 per cent more diverse than other areas upland from lakes and rivers.
Imagine a quiet canoe ride across a misty morning lake, a late afternoon trip trolling for fish, or a leisurely evening swim,– all of these activities require a healthy lake. Of course there are many other benefits of having a healthy lake – perhaps most importantly, healthy lakes provide clean drinking water and habitat for fish and wildlife.
Benefits of Love Your Lake:
- It is an educational tool for lake residents on the state of their lake, how their actions influence lake health and ways they can improve lake health.
- It is private; only the landowner sees his/her property report.
- The program is voluntary, as are the recommended actions.
- It is locally driven and completed by trained assessors.
- It leads to long-term stewardship action.
- Data can be compared over time to determine improvements in lake health.
