National Lakes Assessment 2012 Aquatic macrophyte assessments in Minnesota's 2012 NLA lakes

National Lakes Assessment Project (NLAP) Overview The National Lakes Assessment Project (NLAP) is a statistical assessment of the condition of the nation's lakes, ponds, and reservoirs developed by the US EPA (US EPA 2012). The goal of the NLAP is to assess and monitor the condition of lakes, establish baselines for future comparisons, and to promote collaboration across jurisdictional boundaries. In the conterminous U.S., 1000 representative sample of lakes were randomly selected, stratified across 9 major ecoregions, and by lake size class, and a suite of water quality parameters measured. This program is designed to be repeated every five years, with a subset of the lakes to be resampled. The first sampling effort was completed in 2007 (US EPA 2012), and the second sampling effort took place in 2012. This report is an assessment of the aquatic macrophyte data collected on 50 Minnesota lakes during the 2012 NLAP sampling effort. Eighteen of these lakes were also sampled during the 2007 NLAP study.