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Summertime in the BelgradesContentsfor Printing Article Summaries |
To Dump Or Not To Dump: Is That Really A Question?My office window overlooks the stream that connects Great Pond and Long Pond. This stream is a busy place, with boats, canoes, kayaks, and all kinds of wildlife moving about. I also get to see all the flotsam and jetsam headed downstream toward the dam. Way too often this includes large amounts of grass clippings, leaves, or branches that didn't just blow into the stream. This week's column discusses that a bit. It was written by Roy Bouchard of the Maine DEP Lakes Division, who also happens to be BRCA's longest serving member of our Board of Directors. —Peter Kallin It's time to open camp All that effort to rake it up All of our streams and lakes, along with their inhabitants (fish, plants, wildlife), adapted over thousands of years to a supply of woody material and leaves derived primarily from their shores or washed in from upstream. Streams sort, abrade, and wash downstream all these materials, slowly decomposing them. In many cases, leaf fall and woody material form the primary basis of a stream's food chain and habitat structure. In lakes, these same materials contribute organic matter that collects in small cavities and niches and protected areas — some of them formed by old tree trunks and branches on the lake bottom. This offers significant habitat variation as well as some of the food basis for lake productivity, especially near shore. The majority of the remaining material floats offshore and settle into deep water, where it is slowly degraded by bacteria and fungi in the water and deep sediments. So why not just dump that yard waste overboard? Like many things in nature, a little of a good thing is fine, but too much too fast is disruptive. The processes that the lake uses to degrade these materials can't work well if slugs of debris are loaded in all at once. Material can build up in sheltered places and pack in there when it gets waterlogged. Instead of being in balance with a seasonally varying influx of organic matter, the sediments and invertebrates and microbes see a lot of material all at once. While it's hard to put exact figures on the nutrient loading, dumping many pounds of yard waste (especially green grass clippings) carries phosphorus and nitrogen that the lake really does not need. A lot of us try hard to keep nutrients out of lakes, and spend a lot of money to do that as well. So why do something that is counterproductive? And then there's the question about how our behavior affects others. I don't really care to see my neighbor's yard waste floating along the shore. More broadly, the idea of using the lake as a dumping ground for unwanted stuff is an attitude we've worked hard to change for decades. Nature has its own way of dealing with leaf fall and sticks, etc. Peter Kallin is Executive Director of the Belgrade Regional Conservation Alliance (BRCA). He can be contacted at | ||