LOCSS in Massachusetts!

Jacquelyn Burmeister, Senior Environmental Analyst with the City of Worcester, with a LOCSS lake gauge in Bell Pond.

On Wednesday, June 19, staff from the City of Worcester, Massachusetts installed a LOCSS lake gauge and sign in Bell Pond, a 10 acre lake located in the Bell Hill neighborhood of the city. Senior Environmental Analyst Jacquelyn Burmeister and Matt Dufresne, Jr. Civil Engineer installed the gauge, making Bell Pond the first LOCSS study lake in the state. Although the gauge was installed on June 19, the process began in November 2018 when Jacquelyn attended a talk on the LOCSS project at the annual conference of the North American Lake Management Society (NALMS). After the talk, Jacquelyn reached out to the LOCSS team to ask about including Bell Pond in the project.

The lake gauge in Bell Pond can be seen from the sidewalk along Belmont Street, between Bell Hill Park and Seabury Heights. As with all of our study lakes, the lake height data for Bell Pond can be found on our View Lake Data page. Over the next couple of years, we hope to make New England a focus area for our project, with plans to study as many as 20 lakes in the region. It’s our hope that we can use Bell Pond to show how successful a citizen science project can be in this area.

We are always looking for more lakes to include in our project. If you know of a lake that you think would be a good fit, send us an email and tell us about it.