New: Facebook has blocked all Canadian news. Join our mailing list to stay in the loop.

New: Facebook has blocked all Canadian news. Join our mailing list to stay in the loop.

Frontenac_Environemntal_partnership

Feature Article April 29

Feature Article August 5, 2004

LAND O' LAKES NewsWeb Home

Contact Us

Frontenac Environmental Partnership: providing a high-tech tool for lake stewardship.

Throughout the summer Marilyn Crawford and Art Dunham of the Frontenac Environmental Partnership have been making the rounds of Frontenac township council meetings, bringing a computer with them to demonstrate a use for the electronic maps that that the townships have produced in the past few years in order to complete 911 projects.

Dunham is both the long-time Big Clear Lake Association President and an associate with Global Information Systems (GIS) of Perth, the company that produced the electronic maps for both Central and North Frontenac two years ago. GIS has been asking the townships for permission to use the maps for a new on-line application which will provide lake associations and their members the ability to put together an on-line data base and mapping system. This will enable all information associations have gathered about the locations of cottages, water and shoreline conditions, the locations of spawning beds, zoning restrictions and other lake planning information, to be visible to association members with the click of a mouse. Through a website that can be accessed only by those with a secure password, lake associations will be able to share and add information, as well as contact each other easily.

The presentations by the Frontenac Environmental Partnership, (FEP) a not-for-profit group devoted to lake ecology, have been well received by township councils and lake association gatherings. A number of lake associations in all three of the townships have joined the FEP and have signed up for the new information technology. The North Frontenac Council, which had expressed suspicion about the FEP when the group first formed last year, passed a motion on the spot, granting the Environmental Partnership the right to use the information from its maps, and noting that this use of township information by lake associations is consistent with the townships recent efforts to work in concert with lake associations. Central and South Frontenac have been more cautious, but South Frontenac approved the information sharing at this weeks Council meeting, and Central Frontenac is expected to follow suit in the near future.

In the near future, as lake planning exercises are undertaken, waterfront property owners will have more and more ability to understand the state of their lakes.

With the participation of the Government of Canada