Living Lakes Canada - National Lake Blitz

The Living Lakes Canada's National Lake Blitz Project was born out of the continuing need to help people across the country understand climate change impacts on the health of our lake ecosystems. Lake Blitz participants help create a ‘snapshot’ of lake health in Canada by collecting temperature readings and photo observations at their local lake 2 times per month from May to September each year.

Rising water temperatures are an important sign of climate change impacts on lake health. Warmer temperatures lead to increases in bacteria, invasive species, toxic algal blooms, and loss of habitat for fish and other wildlife. This not only affects water quality and quantity, but recreation, cultural activities, and local economies as well.

Photos help create a snapshot of a lake’s biodiversity and capture any visible threats like invasive species or pollution.

Volunteers are instructed to take temperature readings by submerging the thermometer at least 4 inches in 1 meter deep water. Photo observations are taken using camera phones or digital cameras and capture the lake, shoreline, water colour, wildlife and any invasive species.

This dataset captures all of the temperature and observational data gathered in 2022 from the following provinces and territories: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon.

This data and photo observations can be found on the Lake Blitz Observation Map at lakeblitz.livinglakescanada.ca.

This data set can also be downloaded on Living Lakes Canada's Columbia Basin Water Hub: https://data.cbwaterhub.ca/dataset/2022-national-lake-blitz

Citation

{Living Lakes Canada}. {2022}. "Living Lakes Canada - National Lake Blitz" (dataset). {1}. DataStream. https://doi.org/10.25976/07y1-x981.

Funding Sources

This national monitoring program would not be possible without the support of our funders and donors. Thank you to the National Lake Blitz funders including the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the Government of Canada, TD Canada Trust, Lush, Kicking Horse Coffee, David’s Tea, Earth Rangers, and Water Rangers

Data Collection Information

Volunteers are instructed to take temperature readings by submerging an alcohol thermometer at least 6 inches in 1 meter deep water. Photo observations are taken using camera phones or digital cameras and capture the lake, shoreline, water colour, wildlife and any invasive species (note: photos are not featured in this dataset and can be viewed on lakeblitz.livinglakescanada.ca). The thermometers used have a +/- 1 degree celcius accuracy rating.

Data Processing

This data was cleaned by Living Lakes Canada for standardization and to make the data easier to search, such as making the spelling of lake names consistent. However, observations or temperature readings were not altered.

Attribution Licence (ODC-By) v1.0

You are free to share, copy, distribute, use, modify, transform, build upon, and produce works from the data as long as you attribute any public use of the data, or works produced from the data, in the manner specified in the licence. For any use or redistribution of the data, or works produced from it, you must make clear to others the licence of the data and keep intact any notices on the original data. https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/

Data Disclaimer

No warranty or guarantee exists that the information is accurate, complete, current, or suitable for any purpose. The individual user must confirm the accuracy of the data and whether it will be appropriate for their purpose.

API Access

curl -G https://api.datastream.org/v1/odata/v4/Records --data-urlencode "\\$filter=DOI eq '10.25976/07y1-x981'" -H "x-api-key: PRIVATE-API-KEY"

Changelog