SENECA LAKE, AN IDEAL NATURAL LABORATORY FOR RESEARCH, EDUCATION AND OUTREACH

Seneca Lake, in central New York State, is an ideal natural because the its major tributaries drain different basin areas, land use, bedrock geologies, physiographies, and other characteristics. Educational, research and outreach activities have provided limnological and hydrogeochemical data from the lake and its tributaries since the early 1990's. The bulk of the data were collected weekly from April through October at four sites in the northern end of the lake, and near the terminus of six major tributaries. The onsite lake data included CTD (Sea Bird SBE-25) profiles, plankton tows, secchi disk depths, and collection of surface and bottom water samples, the water was analyzed for nutrients, chlorophyll, turbidity and major ions back in the laboratory. Identical data as well as stream discharge was collected from the tributaries. We utilize this data to delineate sources of impairment, land use and water quality connections, and facilitate scientific arguments to protect, preserve and hopefully improve water quality in the lake.

Near real-time and achieved data are now available online (http://fli-data.hws.edu) through the purchase and deployment of an air and water quality monitoring buoy (YSI). The buoy has been deployed at a mid-lake site in 60 meters of water from April through November since June 2006. It records hourly mean meteorological data (air temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, light intensity, wind speed and direction) and twice-daily water quality profiles (temperature, conductivity, turbidity, and fluorescence), recording data every 1.5 m along the entire water column, and relays the data to a computer on campus. Prepackaged programs display current conditions and annual summaries. Raw data can also be user selected by date range and parameters of interest, and either viewed in tabular form or downloaded as a CSV file suitable for importing into data processing programs. Future plans include expanding the data and visualization offerings to include interactive data visualization capabilities, include earlier CTD and other data, and incorporate an expanded monitoring network to be deployed in Seneca Lake in 2009. The new equipment includes Doppler current profilers, recording thermisters and turbidity sensors, and time-series sediment traps.