By STEPHEN HAMMILL

For Carrollwood resident Joanne Spurlino, having lake-front property isn’t just a perk of Florida living. It’s a responsibility she takes seriously.
Lake Josephine occupies 50 acres tucked in between Gunn Highway and the Veteran’s Expressway. The serenity is dotted with a few dozen small boat docks hugging the water’s edge. At its south-eastern point it curls up to join Rock Lake to its north.

With such an abundance of lakes, Florida residents take their water quality quite seriously; and while most residents recognize the importance of the issue, it can often seem a confusing one, something better left to the experts.

Carrollwood resident Joanne Spurlino disagrees. Taking advantage of her access to the water and in an effort to make a difference she has become a Florida LAKEWATCH volunteer. Spurlino’s house looks out onto Lake Josephine. She and her husband have lived there for nearly 10 years.
Florida LAKEWATCH is a volunteer citizen lake-monitoring program that facilitates “hands-on” citizen participation in the management of Florida lakes through monthly monitoring activities.

Coordinated through the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, the program has been in existence since 1986.

The extent of Spurlino’s knowledge of lake bodies was rather limited when she first moved into her house on Lake Josephine.
“We liked the view,” she said. Life on the lake was quiet, and she most appreciated its scenic qualities.
Spurlino believes anyone who lives near so much nature ought to consider him or herself environmentally aware, and as a property owner, she was naturally concerned about water quality near her home.

She had never heard of LAKEWATCH until she read an article about the program in 1997. She signed up as a collection volunteer a year later and started drawing water samples from Lake Josephine.

Her neighbor, Liz Locke, lives on nearby Rock Lake, and the two take samples from each once a month.
The process involves Spurlino going out in her small boat and drawing three samples, two of which are frozen and sent to the University of Florida in Gainesville to test for nitrogen, phosphor and chlorophyll. A third test is run by dropping a white saucer, called a Secchi disc, named after a 19th century astrophysicist, into the water in order to test its transparency.

“Without the volunteers we would not have a LAKEWATCH program,” said Jason Mickel, Chief Environmental Scientist for Hillsborough County.
Mickel believes it imperative that more residents become aware of the program so there can be more people like Spurlino.
“It’d be impossible to staff 100 people to take these readings,” he said. “We also don’t have access to these lakes. Most of them are private. Our volunteers have dropped over the years. We have not gotten anybody new.”

The data LAKEWATCH volunteers like Spurlino collect ends up as part of the Watershed Atlas. The Hillsborough County Watershed Atlas is a comprehensive online resource for water quality information and ecological data. Conceived as a warehouse of collected water quality data for both scientists and citizens alike, the atlas contains more than one million data samples from 327 water resources, including 234 lakes and 93 rivers. Data recorded in the atlas reaches back 105 years, while new data are entered on a constant basis.

The county and the Southwest Florida Management District fund the program.
The atlas’ Web site is very user-friendly, with colorful photographs of all local water bodies, and charts that explain the data samples presented for the lay person while also offering raw meta-data for researchers.

Most of these samples come from water-collection agencies and volunteers like Spurlino.
LAKEWATCH was founded by Dan Canfield, professor of Limnology with the University of Florida. It is now one of the largest lake monitoring programs in the nation with over 1800 trained citizens monitoring more than 600 lakes in more than 40 counties.
“The work the volunteers do, the data they collect, it’s invaluable,” said Mickel.
Most of Lake Josephine’s residents do not know that someone like Spurlino is at work taking readings of the water.
“My close neighbors know what I do, not so much the others,” she said.
Spurlino credits the LAKEWATCH program with educating her on water quality.
“Now I can look at something because of the education I’ve received and tell if the water is good or bad.,” she said. She also believes that the program has made her closer to the community as a whole.

Mickel stresses the relationships the agency builds with people who live on these lakes, and the access they provide, are essential.
“It’s a very valuable program, because you can’t just look at a body of water once, you have to look at it over time,” said Spurlino. She cites cross-contamination as one of the issues the program has taught her to look out for. “When a body of water is fed from another source—which in my case is Rocky Creek, I’m picking up other sources—it’s a whole can of worms.”

She says hydrilla infestation is a constant threat to lakes in the area. Hydrilla is a long, fast-growing, non-native plant that can spread quickly. It can grow an inch a day in clear water and can overwhelm the native vegetation and pose a major problem for boaters and swimmers. It has infested more than 65,000 acres of Florida’s lakes, rivers, streams and other waterways. Florida managers regard hydrilla as their most serious aquatic pest.
Traffic further disturbs systems and introduces the invasive plant to new bodies of water when boats and jet skis move from one place to another, something the average boat-owner may not know.

Spurlino knows that educating residents is a good way to avoid problems like water pollution and cross-contamination. She interprets data for concerned citizens by going to the atlas and explaining the data to them, or by directing them there herself. The University of Florida also has numerous beginners’ guides available in book form and online in PDF format.

Other initiatives adding data to the Watershed Atlas include the Adopt-A-Pond program, which helps citizens learn to maintain their neighborhood ponds by providing them with the resources and expertise they need, and a fledgling stream-monitoring program with Hillsborough Community College.
Mickel emphasizes that this is about more than just data collecting; it’s about education and implementation.
“It’s a bit of a commitment,” said Spurlino of the volunteering, “But everyone from LAKEWATCH has just been fantastic.” She plans to volunteer as long as she lives on Lake Josephine.

Potential volunteers can call Jason Mickel at 307-1824.
The Hillsborough County Watershed Atlas can be found at http://www.hillsborough.wateratlas.usf.edu/.