Restoration and Management of Lakes and Reservoirs - Hydro-Environmental Analysis: Freshwater Environments - page 467

17

Restoration and Management
of Lakes and Reservoirs

17.1 LAKE MANAGEMENT AND RESTORATION
Restoration typically deals with restoring the social, economic, and ecological functions of some
degraded system, such as a lake or a reservoir, while management could be considered as actions
either to prevent the necessity of restoration or to maintain those functions at a desirable level.
For both restoration and management a holistic approach is required, since there is rarely any
single “magic bullet” that can solve or prevent the problem, and often the source of the problem
may be removed from the lake or reservoir proper, such as in the watershed.
There is a fairly extensive amount of literature and guidance on lake management and resto-
ration, including the North American Lake Management Society's (NALMS) manual Managing
Lakes and Reservoirs (Holdren et al. 2001), which provides a good organizational approach for any
lake management or restoration effort.
The irst component of the lake management or restoration process is developing a fundamental
understanding of the ecological concepts associated with lake and reservoir ecosystems, including
the lake and its watershed and in-lake processes. A number of these concepts were discussed in
earlier chapters of this text.
The second component of the lake management or restoration process is to “have a plan.” The
NALMS (Holdren et al. 2001) manual emphasizes the need for citizen (or stakeholder) involvement
in the process and discusses in detail the following generic steps of the process:

• Clarify goals

• Gather information

• Conceptualize alternatives

• Make formal decisions

• Deine measurable objectives

• Implement

• Evaluate

• Repeat the process

NALMS (Holdren et al. 2001) provides, for example, a hierarchical approach to conceptualizing
alternatives, as illustrated in Figure 17.1 for a recreational lake suffering winterkills.
In repeating the processes, Holdren et al. (2001) indicated that “the end is not the end,” since
things change, from societal goals to scientiic understanding. This is often referred to as adaptive
management.
The next steps in the lake management or restoration process, as described by NALMS (Holdren
et al. 2001), are problem identiication followed by the implementation of methods to predict lake
water quality. Today, this prediction is most commonly accomplished using predictive watershed,
hydrodynamic, and water quality models, which are used to provide the mechanistic link between
management alternatives and predicted impacts. Some of the common problems in lakes and reser-
voirs, such as sedimentation, controlling algae and nuisance plants (e.g., Figure 17.2), and managing
isheries, and their potential solutions are introduced in the following sections of this chapter.