Monitoring the health of local waterways, from under the surface
BRANT LAKE -- Nick Rowell and Jake Dunkley emerged from the waters of Brant Lake holding a variety of small plants, tossing out names such as bladderwort and pondweed. They dove up and down in the shallows of the lake for hours, collecting samples and photographing the underwater plant life in the northern Warren County lake as boats and anglers passed nearby.
Rowell and Dunkley work for Warren County Soil & Water Conservation District, and part of their summer has been spent below the surface of a number of lakes in Warren County, looking for invasive species and documenting the flora that they find.
That work has taken them to big lakes such as Lake George and Schroon Lake, and smaller ones such as Lake Luzerne and Trout Lake. Most lakes in the county get surveying visits over a multi-year period through a variety of grants, including one for this year from the Lake Champlain Basin Program.
"We do this to help the lake associations and the (NY) DEC," WCSWCD District Manager Jim Lieberum said. "It's good that we have more eyes on the water so we can make better decisions."
The Soil & Water team has myriad duties to help protect our waterways, from stormwater runoff projects, water sampling, severe weather hazard mitigation and more.
They are on the front lines of the effort to contain invasive species in our waters, checking sites around the lakes to try to find plants that don't belong there and that can squeeze out the native weeds and grasses that are important parts of the ecosystem. They document what they find with photos, samples and GPS markings.
On Wednesday, Lieberum spotted for the affable duo from a small boat as they dived and snorkeled the area east of the NY State boat launch, their second visit to Brant Lake this summer. Both are certified divers who have spent countless hours over the years below the surface of waters around the county.
Rowell is in his 12th year of diving for WCSWCD, and he can rattle off the obscure scientific names of many plants he and his colleagues find growing in our waters. Some waters have dozens of types of native plants, Trout Lake topping this year's list with 37 counted by the WCSWCD divers.
They are also looking to see how effective treatments are. Brant Lake was treated with ProcellaCOR to target invasive Eurasian watermilfoil, and the treatment's targeted impact is apparent underwater, Rowell explained.
"To see dead milfoil next to a live native species is impressive," Rowell said.
He also can tell you about snapping turtles the size of car tires, big northern pike that startle you in weed beds and of the wallets, cellphones and vape pens that can be found on the bottom of local lakes. A channel catfish the size of a log on Schroon Lake startled the crew one day.
"We do see our fair share of snappers. I can tell you that Trout Lake and Schroon Lake have some of the biggest smallmouth bass I have ever seen," Rowell said. "Sometimes we see freshwater jellyfish. It doesn't get much weirder than jellyfish."
Last summer, Rowell reunited a grateful Glens Falls woman with a wallet and cellphone she had lost near a boat launch on Schroon Lake days earlier.
It's interesting work, but it's also very rigorous.
The Brant Lake survey involved more than a mile of swimming with scuba tanks on their backs, holding clipboards and a sizable underwater camera. Wetsuits are required because of the amount of time they are spending in water that runs from the low 60s to mid-70s in temperature, but "wetsuits on a warm sunny day are like solar panels" when you are at or near the surface.
The latest visit to Brant Lake yielded no new plant species that didn't belong there, but they found more than a dozen native plants that were holding their own.
To learn more about what WCSWCD does, log on to https://warrenswcd.org/.
Photo -- Nick Rowell holds a native plant found growing in Brant Lake in August 2026.
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