Water Resource Management Commons^™

Modeling Response Of Water Quality To Land-Use And Climate Change In Lake Auburn, Me, Nicholas Messina

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lake Auburn, Maine, USA, is a historically unproductive lake that has experienced multiple algal blooms since 2011. The lake is the water supply source for a population of ~60,000. We modeled past temperature, and concentrations of dissolved oxygen (DO) and phosphorus (P) in Lake Auburn by considering the watershed and internal contributions of P as well as atmospheric factors, and predicted the change in lake water quality in response to future climate and land-use changes. A stream hydrology and P-loading model (SimplyP) was used to generate input from two major tributaries into a lake model (MyLake) to simulate physical mixing, …

Evaluating Potential For Water Quality Decline In Maine Lakes, Kaci N. Fitzgibbon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Understanding lake vulnerability with respect to eutrophication and loss of water quality is important for sustainability of aquatic ecosystems. This project aims at identifying and quantifying the effects of relevant physiochemical, climate, and watershed characteristics on lake vulnerability in order to develop management decision tools for the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (MEDEP). In a changing chemical and physical environment, using independent variables from each of these categories and then relating them to the summer lake epilimnetic phosphorus (P) concentrations allows for development of models to inform stakeholders of lake vulnerability to eutrophication problems.

We studied 24 lakes covering a …