Ferrum College Continues Monitoring Smith Mountain Lake Water Quality

     In a Boston Whaler, flanked by lab technicians and armed with monitoring equipment of all sorts, Ferrum College faculty and students will begin their 19th year of the SML Volunteer Monitoring Program, monitoring water quality on Smith Mountain Lake in 2005. This summer, through the generosity of the Appalachian Power Company, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the Tri-County Lake Administrative Commission, Ferrum will monitor dissolved oxygen levels in the lake. Funds were raised by the Smith Mountain Lake Association on behalf of the Ferrum College Life Sciences effort to steward Smith Mountain Lake water quality through education and monitoring.

     Dissolved oxygen levels are critically important to aquatic systems and useful for evaluating the health and the trophic status of a lake. In nutrient enriched lakes, thermal stratification leads to oxygen depletion in the lower layer of the lake and significantly affects the biota, including fish populations. Collecting dissolved oxygen profiles can increase the sensitivity of trophic state analysis and give early indications of nutrient enrichment. The information gathered with this proposal will add to the large body of information already gathered about the dynamics of Smith Mountain Lake.

     The crew typically consists of at least two people, one of them being a project supervisor (Ferrum College Life Sciences faculty Carol Love, Carolyn Thomas or David Johnson) or other faculty member (Bob Pohlad, Todd Fredericksen, Chris Aylesworth, George Byrd) and at least one student lab technician. This summer the student lab technicians are: Brian Wood ‘06, from Stuart, VA; Melissa Sharp‘06, from Stafford, VA; and Mina Ayob ‘06, from Kabul, Afghanistan. On some occasions, a three or even four person crew could be used to provide field experience opportunities in exchange for volunteered assistance with data collection. This schedule would provide six dates for DO data collection over the course of a monitoring season.

     Ferrum College is a four-year, private, co-educational, liberal arts college affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Ferrum offers a choice of nationally recognized bachelor’s degree programs at a cost well below the national average for private colleges. For more information on Ferrum, visit www.ferrum.edu.