Resources

In the first research webinar in the 2025 Fall Research Webinar Series, Andrew Brown discusses his year-long project working with LCSG and six municipalities through the Stormwater Regional Utility Research Fellowship. Brown examined whether regional collaboration among Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) communities could improve efficiency and reduce costs. The MS4 program requires municipalities to take action to reduce pollution from stormwater runoff—rain and snowmelt that flow across roads, parking lots, and other hard surfaces, picking up oil, fertilizers, salt, and debris before entering rivers and lakes. Meeting these requirements is essential for protecting local waterways, but it can also be complex and costly for individual towns to manage on their own.

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.

The third of four research webinars in the 2025 Fall Research Webinar Series features a talk by the Lake Champlain Marine Debris Coalition. The team carried out a series of surveys of businesses and property owners during summer 2025. Goals included understanding use and sale of foam-based products that had potential to end up as marine debris in the lake, such as docks, buoys, take away containers, coolers, and bait buckets. This presentation will summarize high level findings of these surveys and share ideas for outreach to address barriers individuals and businesses face in using encapsulated foam or non-foam products on and near the lake.

This plant list was made to help residents choose the right plants for their property. All these plants can handle salty soils alongside roads, driveways, and in urban areas.

This fact sheet gives an overview of the sustainable salt practice of adjusting salt usage. Adjusting the amount of salt or pre-wet salt based on conditions is an important tool for snow fighters. They can use an online calculator, air-ground temperature sensors, and weather forecasts to inform their decisions.

This fact sheet gives an overview of using brine as a sustainable road salting practice. Brine is a 23.3% salt-water mixture that is used to treat pavements before (anti-icing) and/or after storms (de-icing). It makes salting more precise and effective.

This fact sheet outlines the use of calibration as a sustainable road salting practice. Calibration by doing a “drop test” is a process to measure how much salt comes out of the spreader in a given time period.

This fact sheet outlines the practice of measuring pavement temperatures for sustainable road salt use. By measuring pavement temperatures, snow fighters can know whether it is too cold for rock salt to be effective or if salt is not needed as pavement temperatures are above freezing. The product most commonly used to prevent ice from forming on roads and other hard surfaces is sodium chloride. Sodium chloride is only effective at reducing the freezing point of water down to pavement temperatures of 15F. Alternatively, if pavement temperatures are above freezing, no salt is needed.

This fact sheet outlines the process of pre-wetting as a sustainable road salt practice. Pre-wetting is the process of adding a saltwater mixture (called brine) to dry rock salt.