The BC Lake Stewardship and Monitoring Program for Osoyoos Lake 2005-2020 is a partnership between the BC Lake Stewardship Society
and the BC Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy.
The BC Lake Stewardship Society (BCLSS), in collaboration with the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy (ENV),
has designed a program, entitled The BC Lake Stewardship and Monitoring Program, to address these concerns.
Through regular water sample collections, we can come to understand a lake’s current water quality, identify the preferred uses for a given lake, and
monitor water quality changes resulting from land development within the lake’s watershed.
There are different levels of lake monitoring and assessment. The level appropriate for a particular lake depends on the funding and human resources
available. In some cases, data collected as part of a Level I or II program can point to the need for a more in-depth Level III
program.
This report provides the 2005-2020 results of a Level I volunteer monitoring program for Osoyoos Lake and includes recent Level II data collected by ENV from 2018-2020 as part of the BC Lake Monitoring Network.
The Osoyoos Lake Water Quality Society (OLWQS) www.osoyooslake.ca collected an extensive data set of Secchi depth, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and specific conductivity readings from 2005-2020. Volunteer monitoring took place at five sites on Osoyoos Lake: the North End, Packing House, White Sands, Central Basin, and South Basin and datasets are published on the Osoyoos Lake Water Quality
Society’s website.
The ENV data were collected at the Monashee (Packing House) site in the North basin, the Central basin, and South basin. The lake basins and monitoring site locations are shown on the bathymetric map on page five of the report.
To review the full report on “The Importance of the Osoyoos Lake and its Watershed”, please click on one of the images below.
