Should the monitoring program continue?
We talked about this at lunch Steve. My personal opinion is that Crater Lake National Park should have a lake monitoring research program that is base funded every year. It should be done routinely without any question as to whether it is effective or necessary. This would provide some way of knowing if the lake is indeed deteriorating due to some natural or anthoprogenic cause. I think it should be done because future investigators will benefit from having a long term and thorough historical basis with which to compare their data. This was something we never had when hypothesizing that the lake had changed. If we had had this record, maybe this whole issue wouldn’t have happened. But we never had that, so the program is invaluable and it should be continued. I think there should also be an emphasis on research where a hypothesis can be tested. That gives us a better understanding of the lake’s various processes and how it might respond to increased use and impacts from not only visitors but other external impacts, like whatever goes on in the general region down there. Increased traffic and increased industrialization and increased development in that whole area that could have an impact on the lake.
Should it [the monitoring program] be restructured?
I’m not sure. The monitoring should be done as it has been done over the last 15 or so years. There should be continuity and no big data gaps. Protocol in collecting their data and the techniques they use should be consistent. There should be periodic attempts to take the data and analyze it so that we’re not just piling up data. The data should be used in some way. They still do the annual reports, right?
