Caroling said:
I'm in New Jersey for awhile and won't be able to come to the meeting. I'm interested in participating online, but what can I do? The last thing I heard about Deer Lake was that it was all fresh water. It wasn't really a coastal dune lake. When the outfall opens, water flows to the Gulf, but doesn't flow back in. The other info I got about dune lakes was that there were some in New Zealand, in Horowhenua. Web pages about them said that they were the only ones in the world. Wouldn't it be great if the coastal dune lakes of the world recognized and supported each other?
Hi,
It's good to hear from you even though your away from us - This is the real opportunity Phillip and see with the message board is that we can include more folks regardless of their current location. So thanks!
How can you help?
1. In our discussions we generally ask participants to provide us with their top concerns regarding the coastal dune lake we are focusing during the meeting.
2. Next we look for common themes or issues that overlap and with the group's permission combine where appropriate.
3. The issues are ranked and prioritized so that we can focus on those identified as top concerns for the community associated with the lake.
4. Finally, we work together to provide solutions and / or identify gaps in information required to provide solutions.
So that's the process that you can complete on your own and if we have this before the meeting we care share with others. If not then we can share here in the on-line discussion. A good place to start since we have time before the Deer Lake meeting is to give us your top three concerns (with why and some background), prioritize them and finally offer some potential solutions or help identify information missing that would help us find a solution. Go ahead and post it here - or email us.
lsj@ufl.edu
You're right Deer Lake has more freshwater water influence than some of our other Coastal Dune Lakes in South Walton. There's still interaction most notably during storm events but there's also hydrologic interaction between the Sand and Gravel Aquifer and the Gulf both which help form Deer Lake and our other Coastal Dune Lakes. Depending on the distance from the Gulf some lakes will be "fresher" and other's will be "saltier".
As far as other similar Coastal Dune Lakes in the World it's an interesting investigation. If we were able to find some other areas, it would be nice to know about experiences in that part of the World. Here's some interesting information about coastal lakes in Oregon --
http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/siuslaw/recreation/tripplanning/oregondunes/geology/geology.shtml
Whether these function as our lakes I'm not sure - I have heard reports regarding problems with digging a connections to the Ocean. Just the similarity in management issues is interesting and what we could learn from other experiences with similar situations. - It would neat to have a sister lake in another part of the world like we have sister cities.
Scott