About the Lake & Watershed
Lake Wingra is a spectacular urban lake near the center of Madison, Wisconsin. Its waters provide for exceptional recreation, its shoreline is mostly protected by public ownership, and its watershed contains beautiful, natural areas tucked within an otherwise urbanized environment.
Yet, Lake Wingra is hardly pristine. The lake and its watershed have been considerably affected by urbanization. Sediments, excessive nutrients, road salt, and a host of other pollutants are carried to the lake from our streets, buildings, and even our lawns, parks and other green spaces. Vilas Beach, the most heavily used beach in Madison, sometimes needs to be closed due to potentially unsafe bacterial conditions.
Invasions of aggressive, non-native species into the lake and watershed have reduced the ecological health of native plant and animal communities. Dredging, filling, damming, groundwater pumping, storm sewer construction, and other practices have destroyed former wetlands and natural springs, reduced water clarity, affected water flow, and even dramatically changed the size of the lake itself.
Lake Wingra can be protected, and even improved. But this requires an active watershed community that understands and is concerned about the lake and its watershed.
State of the Lake
Containing the small (339 acre) lake is the Wingra watershed (3460 acres), a headwater to Lake Monona, one of the five Madison lakes known as the Yahara chain.
How clean is the water? Runoff from the densely developed urban areas includes a variety of sediment and toxic chemicals; and the water quality of Lake Wingra has been a concern for several decades. Concerns include excessive nutrient loading, increasing levels of chloride and heavy metals from stormwater runoff, and bacterial levels that sometimes interfere with safe swimming.
Can the lake be improved? Though urban lakes have numerous management challenges, they can still be healthy ecosystems and provide high quality resources with the cooperation of many partners in the watershed community. A high density of people living within a watershed creates both challenges (e.g. stormwater and invasive species) and opportunities (citizen involvement) for watershed management. Read more…
The Wingra Watershed
About watersheds The boundaries of watersheds (and subwatersheds) are generally determined by surface topography, with water of course always flowing downhill. However, construction (e.g., dams, channels, buildings, streets, stormsewers) can change the flow of water, resulting in a change in the shape and size of watershed boundaries.
Wingra watershed boundaries The original Lake Wingra watershed has been changed rather dramatically due to urbanization, largely a result of dredging and filling associated with the construction of Vilas Park, Wingra Creek, and Arboretum Drive. Prior to the dredging of what is now Wingra Creek, Lake Wingra probably drained to Lake Monona through a meandering wetland flowage. The original boundary between the watersheds of these two lakes was probably not precise, since the elevation change is very small and the direction of flow was probably subject to some change in response to varying local conditions. The USGS, using current topographic data, gives the eastern boundary at about where Wingra Creek flows under Beld Street. Read more…
Who lives in the watershed? The Wingra watershed is home to over 33,000 people in 14 different neighborhoods. The UW Arboretum, Vilas Zoo, Edgewood College, 6 parks, 2 golf courses, and numerous public schools, churches, and community centers also call the Wingra Watershed home. Because of protected natural areas like the UW Arboretum, the Wingra Watershed is home to diverse ecological communities. Forests, prairies, and several kinds of wetlands support a high diversity of plants including some rare species like the small white lady slipper and the prairie fringed orchid. The watershed is also home to numerous species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, birds, and fishes. Read more…
Watershed management issues Lake Wingra has an altered watershed because of its urban setting. Urban watersheds differ from natural watersheds because much of the landscape is built by humans. In the Wingra Watershed, about half of the land use is residential neighborhoods and about 15% is commercial uses. Instead of native prairie, forest and wetland vegetation, most of the watershed is covered by elements of a “built environment”: roads, parking lots, buildings, and lawns. Many of these surfaces are impervious, meaning they do not allow rain water to infiltrate into the ground. Read more…