Publications

This short film follows the story of a rain garden in Montpelier's East Rise parking lot. After a devastating flood in the region, the team learned valuable lessons about rain garden design and maintenance. They rebuilt the system with flooding in mind and look forward to the many benefits it provides.

In this 9-12 lesson plan, students will be utilizing their prior knowledge of watersheds, energy flow and matter cycling within an ecosystem and bioaccumulation of methyl mercury. Various modality methods over the course of their school year will allow them to generate a unique research poster that will then be presented in front of a community audience.

In this 9-12 lesson plan, students will be actively involved in sampling aquatic macroinvertebrates from a local stream or river, and then identifying the organisms using pictorial keys. Based on the relative pollution sensitivities of each macroinvertebrate group, overall stream health will be determined using a spreadsheet template or a simpler qualitative data sheet. Mercury levels in sampled dragonflies is an additional activity that can connect student data to a growing national data set.

This field guide is a tool to help you identify and accurately classify foam debris—a common and difficult to identify form of shoreline pollution—while participating in the broader marine debris clean-up effort throughout the Lake Champlain Basin.

This report presents the findings of the Lake Champlain Sea Grant Stormwater Regional Utility Research Fellowship, a one-year collaborative initiative funded by Burlington, Colchester, Essex, Essex Junction, Shelburne, South Burlington, and Lake Champlain Sea Grant. The fellowship was established to assess whether a regional approach to Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) compliance could improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance service delivery for the six participating Vermont municipalities.

This brochure outlines some of the main ways Lake Champlain Sea Grant and the Lake Champlain Basin Program leverage their complementary goals and missions in their collaborative programs.

This K-12 lesson plan highlights ongoing research in Lake Champlain that explores how lakemounts may influence the lake ecosystem. This lesson draws on the effects seamounts have on deep ocean environments. We explore biological-physical interactions using a physical model (upwelling) and infer how various organisms may be adapted to thrive in various lake environments (nearshore, offshore, or lakemounts). The upwelling demonstration is adapted from the NOAA Explorations “Investigation: Seamounts and Biological Productivity” lesson.

In the first research webinar of the spring 2025 series, Mark Malchoff from the Lake Champlain Sea Grant (retired) and Nicole Balk from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation discuss Lake Champlain winter angler demographics, preferences, and behaviors.

In this webinar, Dr. Anne Jefferson, Dr. Elizabeth Doran, and Dr. Lakelyn Taylor from the University of Vermont provide an overview of their NOAA-funded, Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) project analyzing flood communication in local communities.