Increased road salt usage is affecting our lakes. But this cottager group has a solution - Cottage Life

While plenty of cottagers aren’t at the lake when the winter roads are salted, the effects last into many a swim season.

Road salt impacts the lakes and the creatures who make their homes there, as well as the trees along roads. Now, Friends of the Muskoka Watershed (FOTMW) are using citizen science to get to the bottom of the salty situation—which is significantly affecting their lakes in particular.

Chloride in road salt is the most harmful component, says Dr. Neil Hutchinson, a volunteer director with FOTMW. The aquatic life in the Muskoka watershed is especially susceptible to the impacts of chloride because the lakes contain low amounts of calcium, which acts as a protectant. “So low calcium makes aquatic life more sensitive to road salt,” Hutchinson says.

Although the amount of chloride in Muskoka lakes is technically considered safe, it’s trending in a direction that makes Hutchinson nervous. “We’ve seen major shifts in the community of zooplankton over the past 60 years as road salt concentrations have increased,” he says.

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FOTMW is inviting locals to participate in monitoring the lakes. Next winter, cottaging citizen scientists can be equipped with small devices about the size of a pocket pen to measure the conductivity of water, which is a surrogate for chloride. “We can therefore obtain data on the relative importance of different sources of road salt runoff and timing of runoff events across Muskoka, and identify hot spots of high input,” says Hutchinson.

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In the meantime, the good news is that alternatives to road salt already exist. Better options include sand, pickled sand (a mix of sand and salt), or salt brine, which is more likely to stay in place rather than run off into lakes and rivers. More good news: Hutchinson reports that his municipality takes the harms of road salt seriously and has reduced its use there by 40 per cent over the past four years.