Love Your Lakes program offers free shoreline consultation for South Okanagan lakeside landowners

Photo: Contributed

Shoreline property owners on Skaha Lake, Twin Lakes, Trout Lake, Vaseux Lake or Okanagan Lake in Summerland can now download free personalized reports on how to optimize water quality, flood risk and property erosion.

The Love Your Lake program, run by the Southern Interior Land Trust, has surveyed shoreline properties, and their professional biologists have come up with reports for each one.

The Twin Lakes program in particular is an example of how beneficial it can be — with the help of findings and recommendations from the survey of those shorelines, a restoration plan was designed to restore 125 metres of shore in the small community that was ravaged by flooding in 2018.

The project included planting 60 native shrubs and trees along the degraded shoreline. Plants were purchased from a local nursery and planted by members of the Twin Lakes Strata. The Love Your Lake Micro-grant Program made that project possible.

Any shoreline resident of the aforementioned lakes can access their own personalized report, free of charge.

Each report includes locally-relevant links and a personalized assessment with tips on how to optimize the property using natural strategies.

"It is essentially a free consultation with a professional biologist," says SILT executive director Al Peatt.

“Each report helps the landowner understand how their property-management decisions influence lake health and suggest actions to help improve lake health while protecting views and property values.”

Codes to access the reports have been sent out to property owners in the mail.

If shoreline property owners need help to get their personalized report, they can contact Al Peatt at: [email protected] or call/text (250) 328-4699. Neither the data nor the resulting reports are used for any regulatory purpose – they are meant only for the shoreline owner.

Financial support for the program is provided by the South Okanagan Conservation Fund, Canadian Wildlife Federation and Watersheds Canada, among others.

For more information on the program, click here.