Ecological news - Stan Topping

The ecology will be much in the spotlight this year with a number of activities already under way. The South Channel volunteers will be quite busy, and I expect happily so.

* The Greater Bay Area Foundation Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Project - We will be responsible for the monitoring of a plot on McLaren Island, one of twelve on a line across Georgian Bay, over the next few years. This will add essential information to our environmental database.

* We will continue to work with The Septic System Re-inspection Program. In my opinion this program has improved the water quality in several of our cottage bays.

* We will be providing transportation for The Forest Health Monitoring Program this summer. This project is concerned with forest pests. The drought conditions over the past two years have made many trees especially susceptible to insect damage. The township has contracted with BioForest Technologies Inc. to monitor the situation again this year, as it has over the two previous years. The links page on the townships web site, www.thearchipelago.on.ca , can be used to obtain the reports for 2002 and also on BioForest's web site, www.bioforrest.org These reports list some of the hot spots of insect damage and contain very good descriptions complemented by excellent pictures of what we should be looking for over the course of this coming spring and summer. If you have any questions or suspect an insect problem BioForest Technologies can be contacted by email at bforrest@soonet.ca or by phone at 705-942-5824.

* The Water Quality Monitoring Program, for the fifth year, will resume after a workshop to be held in early May. A greater emphasis will be placed on testing for phosphates this year. But phosphate testing is costly because it is beyond our volunteer teams' capabilities and must be done by commercial laboratories. Thus phosphate testing will be more limited than our biological and physical testing which has continually expanded since the program began.

Here in the South Channel we are fortunate in as much as that the phosphates coming into our water are mostly from cottage septic systems and gray water pits. Thus, we have quite a bit of control over the phosphates that go into our water, simply by monitoring our own practices. We are also quite blessed in that our large bays, Seven Mile Bay and Five Mile Bay, are very deep and in excellent health. We will have the collated and adjusted results for all of our South Channel test sites available immediately following our May workshop.