Across Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) — an area roughly the size of P.E.I. — you’ll find more than a thousand lakes carved by retreating glaciers during the last ice ages. Since 2022, HRM’s LakeWatchers have been monitoring as much of that fresh water as they can to track changes and inform municipal planning policies.

Twice a year, a combination of volunteers and consultants gather data at 70+ lakes. “There’s really a lot of community stewardship and a lot of community care going on,” says Elizabeth Montgomery, Water Resources Specialist at HRM. “We wouldn’t be able to do the work that we’re doing without the work that they are doing.”

LakeWatchers take samples and collect measurements both from the centre of each lake and its outlet. The resulting data — including pH, temperature, oxygen levels, total phosphorus, chlorophyll, chloride and E. coli— produce a robust profile of each body of water.

The findings are available on HRM’s open data portal. However, because the portal was primarily designed to serve municipal planners and road engineers, it’s difficult for the general public to navigate.

“Unless you’re a bit of a data scientist or at least an Excel nerd, you’re probably not going to find what you’re looking for,” explains LakeWatchers Coordinator Chris Kennedy.

LakeWatchers volunteers. Photo credit: HRM LakeWatchers Program.

Moving from open data to usable data

So HRM turned to DataStream to help standardize the information and make it more accessible. Together, they created formatting protocols that allow water quality data to be easily uploaded and automatically shared to both the municipality’s website and the DataStream platform. That creates a much more seamless process and reduces the risk of errors, says Montgomery.

The changes allow LakeWatchers volunteers to see their results posted quickly in a more useable format , reinforcing the value of their work. At the same time, DataStream’s powerful visualization tools make it easy to find information and identify unmonitored areas, inspiring more people to get involved and catalyzing collaborations.

The DataStream platform also provides a much deeper pool of data, combining LakeWatchers results with data from monitoring efforts by the Government of Nova Scotia, university researchers, residents’ associations, watershed protection societies and other environmental groups.

“The value of having all this data from so many different people being compiled in one place can’t be overstated,” says Montgomery.

LakeWatchers volunteers. Photo credit: HRM LakeWatchers Program.

Small changes drive big municipal impacts

For the municipality, that wealth of easy-to-access intel can inform everything from low-impact housing developments to road salt use strategies. “The chloride in a lot of the urban lakes is through the roof,” Montgomery notes.

She also sees opportunities to work with Halifax’s water utility to address storm outflows that are harming water quality: perhaps by installing small wetlands to filter stormwater as it enters vulnerable lakes.

Kennedy agrees. “We’re really trying to make recommendations to various different departments within the municipality to make small changes that could have big impacts,” he says. “Having the data on DataStream — being visual and accessible — is really, really important if we’re going to create the change we want.”

View Dataset: https://doi.org/10.25976/85pw-zj92