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.
11 Activities Lake Groups and Their Members Can Participate in for a Healthy Lake by Love Your Lake
Lake groups can implement programs to protect lake health and biodiversity by engaging property owners in various activities. These activities include organizing native plant purchases, participating in citizen science programs, and monitoring water quality. Learn more in this article from Love Your Lake!
4 new resources to help protect our wetlands this World Wetlands Day
World Wetlands Day celebrates this wonderful, incredibly important ecosystem type and advocates for its conservation across the globe. This blog post is part of our contribution to the conversation, highlighting 4 great resources for you to boost your understanding of wetlands and sharing how we can all work towards protecting them.
5 ways to get involved this World Rivers Day!
This blog post celebrates World Rivers Day, which raises awareness about issues affecting our rivers and waterways and engages people in helping conserve them. This blog post provides 5 different ways you can get involved to help conserve and protect our freshwater, from scanning watershed maps to taking part in community events. It also provides you with some extra resources you can use to further boost your watershed wisdom.
A Home for Fish: The Benefits of In-Water Woody Debris
Fish require shelter just like we do, in the form of in-water woody debris. It affords them protection from predators, access to macroinvertebrates to feed on, and shelter from the hot summer sun. This blog explores the many benefits of building up in-water woody debris, provided by the brush bundles deployed by our Fish Habitat program each year.
Algae: Pond Scum or Essential?
Although algae is most known for the problems it causes, such as eutrophication, oxygen depletion of the water, and fish toxicity, it is not in itself bad - it only becomes problematic when in excess. Read this thoroughly researched blog post to learn more about this misunderstood organism and what results in it causing the problems for our freshwater that it is most famous for.
A Love Your Lake success story: City of Greater Sudbury, Ontario
This article, submitted by the Nepahwin Lake Watershed Stewardship Group and Long Lake Stewardship Committee, highlights the success of the delivery of our Love Your Lake program in the City of Greater Sudbury. After identifying a need for action through the program, the community-wide push for change that followed was swift and impactful - read about it here!
An Overview of The Natural Edge
This video is an introduction to The Natural Edge program, telling of our process and the many benefits afforded by a naturalized shoreline.
A Physically Distanced Love Your Lake Field Season
COVID-19 changed everything, including we socialized, how we travelled, and even how we assessed shorelines! Read about how staff from our Love Your Lake program overcame the challenges posed by this global pandemic to bring the same action and outreach to waterfront property landowners in Central-Eastern Ontario.
Are Canadas lakes becoming salty?
The impacts of road salts on freshwater ecosystems has been an issue of increasing concern in recent years. Their potential impacts on flora and fauna, unsuited to these new saline conditions, could be vast - and this urgency commands a need for a better public understanding of how we can manage this issue. Read this blog post to learn what is causing recent increases in salinity and how we can work together to reduce its impact on our freshwater.