Lake Assessment Program - Pleasant Lake, Wright County, Minnesota

Pleasant Lake is located in Wright County, in the city of Annandale, MN. This lake has a surface area of 509 acres and a maximum depth of 74 feet. Mean depth of the lake was estimated at 18 feet. The watershed of Pleasant Lake is approximately 4 mi2 acres (excluding the lake surface area). Land use in the watershed is characterized by open cultivated (46 percent), pasture/grassland (19 percent), forest (14 percent), and residential/urban (12 percent) and water/marsh areas (9 percent). These land use percentages are fairly typical for lake watersheds in the North Central Hardwood Forests (NCHF) ecoregion of the state. Pleasant Lake was sampled during the summer of 2005 by Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) staff and volunteer Tab Ashwill as part of the advanced Citizen Lake-Monitoring Program (CLMP+). Water quality data collected during the study revealed a summer-mean total phosphorus concentration of 31 ?g/L, chlorophyll-a concentration of 12 ?g/L, and a Secchi transparency of 7 feet. All three of these values are well within the typical range exhibited by reference lakes in the NCHF ecoregion. Total phosphorus, chlorophyll-a, and Secchi transparency all help to characterize the trophic status of a lake. For Pleasant Lake, these measures indicate eutrophic conditions