Add wildfire, climate change to the list of Lake Whatcom worries
As for those less-than-dramatic pollution results, Angela Strecker, Western Washington University鈥檚 director of the Institute for Watershed Studies, explained that measures of phosphorus, dissolved oxygen and algae blooms were more or less stable, although phosphorus appeared to be declining from a peak around 2010.
Dissolved oxygen went up significantly in 2023, but Stecker cautioned that one year does not make a trend.
鈥淚t is promising to see kind of this bump up of oxygen over time, and so that鈥檚 something that we鈥檒l be keeping an eye on in the years to come,鈥 Strecker said.