Stratford watershed group hopes new device will help fix town ponds

The Stratford watershed group has a new piece of equipment that it hopes will help provide a better picture of what is happening in the community's ponds.

Kelly's Pond was once a favourite fishing hole in Pondside Park, but siltation from developments in the area has left much of the pond no more than a metre deep.

There was an initiative announced in 2015 to restore the pond, but problems with the water quality persist.

"Every year it is important to see what's happening in the moment in the pond," said Madeleine Crowell, co-ordinator for the Stratford Area Watershed Improvement Group.

"We want to link some of the issues we've seen with what the source of that issue is, so we can address the problem."

• Stratford returns to Kelly's Pond problem
• Kelly's Pond, former anglers' delight in Stratford, to be restored

Monitoring oxygen levels

The new device is called a dissolved oxygen logger and it was installed on a buoy in Kelly's Pond this summer.

The unit monitors temperature and dissolved oxygen levels in the pond every half-hour. 

"This summer, we've had a number of heavy rain events so that's really intense rain coming into the pond through two of the streams that enter it and it's bringing with it sediment," Crowell said.

"We're hoping to look at the dissolved oxygen readings and find out from that whether that silt is having a negative impact especially on oxygen levels and therefore on organisms in the pond."

Crowell points to heavy rains on Aug. 9, 2018.

"We had a big rain event so we had a spike there with our temperature and our dissolved oxygen levels and that's normal, you would expect that. Then immediately following, we saw a drop and we had a big anoxic event, which is a period of no dissolved oxygen," Crowell said.

"That dropped down for three or four days so that's a really big event that happened in the pond this summer and that's what we were hoping to catch with this logger."

Good progress

Winston Maund has lived on the edge of Kelly's Pond since the 1980s and is chair of the Stratford watershed group.

"It's a very important step to take and it's giving good results and hopefully from the readings that we're getting we're going to get some progress made on fixing up the pond situation," Maund said.

"We have to know whether we have enough oxygen for fish and other wildlife to survive, what kind of sediment is coming into the pond and how deep it's getting."

The Town of Stratford has struck a subcommittee to take a look at fixing the siltation problem in the community's ponds. 

Maund estimates fixing the watershed will cost more than $100,000.

So what would he like to see happen?

"Some serious decisions made to how we're going to enhance the pond, whether we're going to dredge it or whatever method we can to enhance the pond back to its normal state," Maund said.

Pond in worse shape

Crowell is also concerned about the current state of Moore's Pond, which is part of the same watershed system and feeds into Kelly's Pond.

"If anyone has driven by it, can see that it's obviously in much worse shape than Kelly's Pond," Crowell said.

"It's quite sediment filled, to the point that you can see it coming up out of the water and there are ducks sitting on top of that soil in there."

Crowell says the Stratford watershed group is looking forward to using the dissolved oxygen logger for years to come.

"This was the first summer with it and it was a success so we'll have it back in the pond again next spring," Crowell said.

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