Researchers hope to improve Minnesota lakes with water quality survey

We love the water here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and researchers are hoping to better understand what we think about their water quality.

On your next visit to a lake in the Twin Cities, you may notice new signs. They're a part of the latest research project run by scientists at the University of Minnesota and St. Thomas.

"We want to hear from people who are visiting lakes to understand why they come to the lake, what they care about, what they do when they get to the lake, and how they perceive the quality of the water in the lakes throughout the Twin Cities," said Bonnie Keeler, the director of the Water Resources Center at the University of Minnesota.

The signs are posted around the 17 different lakes across nine counties included in the study, asking you to rank your thoughts about the water on a scale of 0-10.

"They ask you to rate the water quality of the lake. You send a text message to a phone number that's on the sign and then you interact with a chatbot. So you're responding back and forth via text message with this short survey," Keeler said.

Keeler is one of the scientists overseeing the study. She said we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars each year to improve water quality, but we know very little about how people actually perceive and value those improvements. 

"This is providing a key piece of missing information that's going to help lake managers better understand how to manage our lakes for what people really care about," Keeler said.

"I'm studying data analytics at the university," said Logan Sorsveen, a University of St. Thomas junior working on the project. "It's cool to work with numbers and to actually enter them into a spreadsheet and to know that they'll be used later on in an analysis in order to just show that lakes in Minnesota are special and that they need care."