Drew Dixon
A University of Florida (UF) volunteer lake-monitoring program saved the state about $5 million in water quality analysis in 2024.
A new report found the LAKEWATCH program gathered so many volunteers to monitor lake water in the state that it ended up saving Florida millions of dollars that it would have cost to pay professionals for the work.
The program is coordinated by the UF Instituted of Food and Agriculture Sciences (IFAS) and the School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatic Sciences (SFFGS). Those UF programs have been around for decades and in 1991, the Legislature designated and established the LAKEWATCH program which has grown with some 880 volunteers now participating.
“Long-term data sets such as LAKEWATCH’s database are invaluable for understanding how Florida’s lakes are changing over time as our state populations grow and urbanize,” said SFFGS Extension Coordinator and Associate Professor Michael Andreu.
The recently released “2024 UF/IFAS Florida LAKEWATCH Annual Report” included an expanded analysis of the impact of the program. It analyzed potential government funds that would have been necessary if volunteers weren’t used.
“In 2024, we began tracking some important numbers that have helped us better quantify and celebrate our volunteers’ incredible work,” said Gretchen Lescord, Assistant Professor at SFFGS and director of Florida LAKEWATCH.
“Some of it we had an idea of, like the number of volunteers we have (883) and the number of waterbodies they monitor (627). But knowing that all that work resulted in an estimated $5M of savings in monitoring costs for the state of Florida in 2024 alone is very powerful.”
The economic impact estimate is based on the cost it takes for the Polk County extension agents cost for sampling, which runs about $287 per sample station per month and then multiplied for the whole year. And there are 1,722 sampling stations.
“When external funding in the form of Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and county contracts plus analytical fees is computed, the total savings estimate for water analysis cost is over $5 million. Internal annual funding from UF/IFAS and SFFGS funding (which totals approximately $430,000 annually) was not subtracted from this cost estimate,” a UF news release said.
