Sentinel Lake Assessment Report Cedar Lake (49-0140) Morrison County, Minnesota

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) is working in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) on the Sustaining Lakes in a Changing Environment (SLICE) Sentinel Lakes Program. The focus of this interdisciplinary effort is to improve understanding of how major drivers of change such as development, agriculture, climate change, and invasive species can affect lake habitats and fish populations, and to develop a long-term strategy to collect the necessary information to detect undesirable changes in Minnesota Lakes (Valley 2009). To increase our ability to predict the consequences of land cover and climate change on lake habitats, SLICE utilizes intensive lake monitoring strategies on a wide range of representative Minnesota lakes. This includes analyzing relevant land cover and land use, identifying climate stressors, and monitoring the effects on the lake's habitat and biological communities. The Sentinel Lakes Program has selected 24 lakes for long-term intensive lake monitoring (Figure 1). The "deep" lakes typically stratify during the summer months only. "Shallow" lakes are defined as mixing continuously throughout the summer. "Cold water" lakes are defined as lakes that either harbor cisco, lake whitefish, or lake trout and are the focus of research funded by the Environment and Natural Resource Trust Fund (ENRTF). "Super sentinel" lakes also harbor cold-water fish populations and research on these lakes is also funded by the ENRTF. Cedar Lake was selected to represent a cold water, deep lake in the North Central Hardwood Forests (NCHF) ecoregion. Cedar Lake is a 96 hectare (236 acre lake), located near Upsala, Minnesota in Morrison County, within the Mississippi River (Sartell) watershed. The lake has a maximum depth of 26.8 meters (88 feet) and a mean depth of 11.9 meters (39 feet). The lake is 28% littoral with one public access on the south shore of the lake. The total contributing watershed for Cedar Lake is 552 hectares (1,363 acres). Cedar Lake was a reference lake for NCHF ecoregion reference condition development in the mid 1980s (Heiskary and Wilson, 2005).