Welcome to the Watersheds Canada Resource Library!
Here you will find a comprehensive collection of free educational resources dedicated to helping rural shoreline property owners, families, municipalities, lake groups, and educators protect their lakes and restore natural habitat. Explore guides, best practices, case studies, lesson plans, and tools to become a freshwater protector. All resources are freely shareable so please include them in a newsletter, on social media, or printed for a community booth!
Funding support thanks to Peterborough K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation, and S.M. Blair Family Foundation.
How The Natural Edge Works
Protect your lake by restoring a natural shoreline. We want to help you improve your lake’s water quality by reducing run-off and attracting wildlife like butterflies and frogs.
How to Assess Your Property to Help Protect Freshwater Health webinar
Have you ever wondered how to naturalize your shoreline? What should you and your family be looking for on your property that might impact water quality and wildlife habitat availability? Chloe and Monica from Watersheds Canada will walk you through a property assessment to show you what our staff look for on a property that can help protect freshwater health and provide crucial habitat for wildlife.
How to Soften a Shoreline Property
A 'hard' shoreline refers to one that has significant manmade structures, from retaining walls to docks. Hard shorelines come with many potential negative impacts on natural hydrological processes and wildlife in the adjacent freshwater body, so we should all strive to soften (re-naturalize) our shorelines where possible. This blog post is a quick-start guide to help you do just that!
If People Can See Value, They Will Get Involved: An Interview with Judy Hall
This is an interview with Judy Hall, President of the Dalhousie Lake Association. She sat down with the Watersheds Canada team to share her valuable thoughts about the importance of community engagement when it comes to preserving the long term health of lake ecosystems.
Let Us Prioritize Freshwater this Ontario Election Season!
This blog post was written prior to the 2022 Ontario provincial election. It emphasizes the importance of this particular election for freshwater health, inspiring voters to get informed and take to the polls to make their voices heard to influence freshwater health. It also provides the top 5 questions we think property owners should ask their municipal candidates to get a sense of how they value freshwater stewardship.
Love Your Lake – Microgrant impact report
The Love Your Lake microgrant program connects shoreline property owners with information to make smart land management choices. The program has assessed 44,274 properties on 187 lakes since its inception in 2013. The microgrant recipients implemented various projects, including shoreline restoration, native plant giveaways, and contests to promote shoreline health and biodiversity. The projects demonstrated the importance of naturalization and the benefits of community involvement in lake health.
Managing Water Runoff
The water flowing off our properties can carry with it all the nutrients, pesticides, bacteria, and other harmful substances that it picks up along the way. This blog post provides an overview of some of the most impactful changes you can make to your property to manage surface water runoff properly, including using riparian buffers, eavestroughs, alternative lawns, and rain gardens.
Manitoba Wildflower Garden Guide
This guide explains the ecological importance of wildflower pollinator gardens in supporting declining bee and butterfly populations. It provides step-by-step instructions for building a garden, including site selection, purchasing native seeds or plugs, and preparing the soil. Detailed planting and maintenance tips are offered to ensure the long-term success of the wildflowers. The document concludes with descriptions of popular native species suitable for Manitoba gardens, such as Black Eyed Susan and Prairie Crocus.
Marshes are some of my favourite places - Jennifers Natural Edge testimonial
Jennifer was one of many volunteers who recently helped renaturalize two shoreline properties on the St. Lawrence River. Using native plants in and around a marsh area, the shoreline property will now be more resilient to flooding events and erosion.