Originally published in Lake of the Woods Area News, Volume 55, Number 1, Early Spring 2025
20 years ago, in 2005, the Lake of the Woods Water Sustainability Foundation (LOWWSF) began convening citizens, municipalities, Indigenous nations and state, provincial and federal governments in Canada and the United States to amass the scientific, technical and community knowledge needed to inform an international water quality plan while building the trust and capacity to implement it. With the support of people in our watershed, we called for an International Joint Commission (IJC) mandate for Lake of the Woods, and in 2013, governments directed the IJC to establish the International Rainy-Lake of the Woods Watershed Board (IRLWWB).
Since our inception—and indeed, long before that—algae blooms, driven by excessive nutrient (phosphorus) loading, have been a consistent water quality concern facing Lake of the Woods. Then, as today, algae blooms were becoming more frequent, toxic and lasting later in the year.
After two decades of building the scientific and policy-making base to support long-term water quality sustainability for Lake of the Woods, we are finally at an important inflection point in 2025. In 2024, the IRLWWB adopted water quality alert levels that reflect long-term nutrient reduction goals, and shared these with the IJC as recommendations to guide development of international water quality objectives. Meanwhile, Minnesota is implementing its remediation plan for the lake.
In the coming year, the Foundation is moving forward a key action to address the algae problem. We will be working with local communities, knowledge keepers, stakeholders and experts in the Canadian portions of Rainy River and the Lake of the Woods to develop a domestic phosphorus management plan that will, like the Minnesota plan, support international water quality goals.
Since the early 2000s, scientists and government agencies at all levels in both Canada and the United States have worked to help us better understand the problem of algae and nutrient impairment on Lake of the Woods. Since the late 1980s, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has been tracing phosphorus movement from the Rainy River, the largest tributary to the lake, through to the lake, where excess phosphorus fuels algae blooms. In 2008, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared Lake of the Woods in exceedance of federal eutrophication criteria, which triggered the state to conduct a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) study of excess nutrients in Lake of the Woods. In 2021, Minnesota published its final TMDL study report, following ten years of intensive research, documenting sources and movements of phosphorus through the system. The TMDL report provides a detailed plan to guide Minnesota’s watershed restoration for the coming decades.
On the Canadian side of the watershed, between 2016-2020, the Government of Canada invested in binational studies of algae and nutrients in Lake of the Woods. Canada also established a water quality monitoring program through Environment and Climate Change Canada that continues to do annual surveys of Lake of the Woods each fall and year-round monthly river water sampling for both Rainy River and the Winnipeg River, often working in parallel with colleagues in Minnesota to ensure maximum coverage and comparability of data collected.
Indigenous agencies, including Grand Council Treaty #3 in Canada and Red Lake Nation in Minnesota, working in cooperation with the US EPA and the Science Museum of Minnesota, also have water quality monitoring programs throughout the basin. Other government agencies at the provincial and state level, as well as citizen scientists, also contribute to our body of water quality data.
With so many agencies and partners active in the basin, LOWWSF plays a crucial role in supporting and often coordinating interagency collaboration. LOWWSF convenes the International Multi-Agency Arrangement (IMA), where water resources managers and technicians meet and share information, collaborate, and identify the resources needed to do the work that protects our water quality. In this way, agency partners fulfill their respective unique mandates, while data, information and program outputs can be leveraged and accessed to achieve goals shared among agencies and across borders.
The IRLWWB’s 2024 water quality alert levels and recommendations for water quality objectives, focused largely on phosphorus reductions, reflect the consensus among dozens of agencies, organizations and groups that work on Lake of the Woods water quality. These shared goals aim to sufficiently reduce Lake of the Woods phosphorus loads and concentrations over the next 20 years to decrease harmful algae blooms. In the meantime, IMA partners are collaborating on a long-term, shared, international monitoring, assessment and reporting program to track progress and address any water quality exceedances that may arise.
LOWWSF’s work over the next couple of years will be focused on developing a Canadian domestic phosphorus management plan. The work is supported through the Canada Water Agency’s Freshwater Ecosystem Initiative for Lake of the Woods.
For this project, our task involves establishing a network of interested parties to support this planning work that will include developing a framework to monitor and review progress toward achieving desired phosphorus-reduction outcomes for Lake of the Woods. We anticipate this framework will support the IRLWWB’s alert levels for nutrients and algae, as well as any related future international water quality objectives.
The project steering committee launched in January 2025 and there will soon be two project working groups, as well as an Indigenous engagement committee. One group will examine point sources—permitted wastewater facilities—and their task will be to assess whether and where load reductions might be achieved from permitted facilities. The other group will look at non-point sources—the nutrients that flow from the landscape and may be related to agriculture, forestry, mining, development, and other land-use changes, as well as natural sources including erosion, sediment transfer and airborne sources. That group will help to identify areas that can be targeted for phosphorus abatement, as well as strategies to do so.
Anyone wishing to learn more about the project or get involved can contact Teika or Meg at LOWWSF. Watch for project updates throughout the year in future issues of Area News.
