Streams Feeding Smith Mountain

Lake Tell a Story

Summer is just around the corner and summer brings visitors, children and grandchildren who want to use Smith Mountain Lake for recreational purposes. This year will be no different. Right now the lake is high, algae haven’t appeared, and invasive weeds haven’t begun to emerge. And streams are feeding our lake with runoff. All of this is good.

But how do we know that what the streams deliver to the lake is high water quality? By monitoring small freshwater invertebrates, a.k.a., bugs, such as mayflies and stoneflies. These critters live in stream beds and tell us more than you can imagine about water quality.

Why? Because bugs like mayflies and stoneflies are picky. They don’t like poor water quality. So, when there are lots of these bugs, by definition we have good water. There are other types of bugs that proliferate in our streams. Black flies aren’t picky. Their larvae survive in water with high quantities of organic matter, nutrients and pollutants. You can see that there is a pattern: good bugs equal good water; bad bugs equal poor water.

Smith Mountain Lake Association (SMLA) has teamed with members of the Blue Ridge Foothills and Lakes Chapter of the Virginia Master Naturalist (BRFAL) program and the local Virginia Save Our Streams (VA SOS) program to expand the number of streams being monitored in the Upper Roanoke watershed area. These include some of the streams that feed Smith Mountain Lake.

We are sending out an SOS to all concerned citizens around our lake. We are looking for volunteers to monitor our streams quarterly. SMLA, BRFAL and the local VA SOS will continue to hold orientation sessions to help interested individuals understand water quality and how to monitor it. Orientation sessions will then be followed by hands on in-stream training sessions with certified trainers leading to certification as volunteer SOS monitors.

Data our volunteers collect goes into the VA SOS database, is used by the Department of Environmental Quality, and compliments data the SMLA/Ferrum College Water Quality Monitoring Program. This last program has become a standard across the nation for volunteer lake monitoring programs. It has been going on for the past twenty–two years.

For information on becoming a certified SOS monitor, please contact De English at deenglish@smlassociation.org or by calling the SMLA office, 540.719.0690.