Last month, we spoke with a professor about the importance of learning about lake ice and how it impacts our communities. 

SUNY New Paltz students are assisting with major research surrounding this by getting hands-on experience testing lake water.

What You Need To Know

  • On a weekly basis, regardless of the weather, the students visit Mohonk Lake to test water clarity, temperature, what may be dissolved in the water and more through a variety of methods at different depths

  •  By conducting the tests, the students are able to research how lake health has changed over time
  • The research being done surround how climate change impacts lakes, including their health and ice coverage during colder months

Soon-to-be graduate Lauren Fedun has been part of this team for the last three years.

“I love it. I look forward to this every week. It's great to come out here. We have a beautiful sample site. It's a lot of fun. We have some great people on the team, so it's really awesome,” Fedun said.

On a weekly basis, regardless of the weather, the students visit Mohonk Lake to test water clarity, temperature, what may be dissolved in the water and more through a variety of methods at different depths. By conducting the tests, the students are able to research how lake health has changed over time.

“I think it's incredibly important to get students involved in research because they're the future of both scientists that are going to understand the world as we go forward and as the world continues to rapidly change, but also as advocates and as interpreters of scientific information to their family members and to the general communities,” said David Richardson, a biology professor at SUNY New Paltz.

The studies being conducted surround how climate change impacts lakes, including their health and ice coverage during colder months.

“By collecting data on it, we could create figures and really have the proof behind what's going on and what our future looks like because we're all going to be affected by it in one way or another, whether it's directly affected by it, or like our lakes and our recreation that's involved with climate change,” Fedun said.

Richardson said doing multiple studies about how climate change impacts lake health takes a lot of collaboration.

“We are doing now a study that is in collaboration with a number of different universities across the country, including University of Vermont, University of Missouri, Cornell University and University of Colorado in Boulder, to track what are the changes that are happening,” Richardson said. “As we go from a lake that looks like the lake that we have here at Mohonk in New York, and in the future, it might look more like a lake that we have in Virginia or in Maryland.”

Although Fedun will be shifting gears to pharmaceuticals when she finishes her undergraduate studies next month, she said believes doing research and understanding their findings will continue to be beneficial in the future.

“It's really just a great model to view what our future looks like or what it could look like,” Fedun said.

Richardson said the partnership between SUNY New Paltz, Mohonk Mountain House and the Mohonk Preserve organization gives students this experience to conduct valuable research.