While most boaters and anglers are still a few weeks away from having to confront the weeds that frequently choke parts of the Madison lakes, Jim Leverance is already in full combat mode.

Wednesday morning he was piloting a boat around Lake Monona’s Turville Bay, consulting a handheld GPS unit and directing a fleet of weedcutters slashing away at pesky beds of Eurasian watermilfoil, the filament-like invasive plant that binds propellers and weighs down fishing lures.

Leverance, a retired Department of Natural Resources lake specialist, has been hired by Dane County to help oversee a research project, now in its second year, aimed at testing a new weed control approach in the Madison lakes. The work is an extension of previous studies by the Army Corps of Engineers elsewhere in the state. Those studies evaluated the application of herbicide in the spring to knock back invasive plants such as Eurasian watermilfoil and allow native plants to flourish. Now Leverance and others are combining that approach with early weed cutting to see what happens.

Though it may be a few years before the results of the research result in new weed management techniques, the study is but one of several examples of a heightened effort to address the problems facing what is arguably Dane County’s most striking and valuable natural resource — its chain of shining lakes.

The past two years have seen a flurry of activity, including a project called Yahara Clean that has pulled together local governments and agencies as well as private groups to study and come up with more aggressive ways of stemming the flow of polluted runoff and sediments into the lakes. Linked with that is the creation of a long-term structure and strategy for addressing lake issues. Called the Yahara Lakes Legacy Partnership, the effort establishes a broad coalition of groups that will carry work on the lakes into the future.

Other ongoing lake-related work includes studies of pollution problems on Madison beaches, the removal of carp from Lake Wingra and the restoration of Cherokee Marsh above Lake Mendota.

All of this activity brings new energy to the upcoming annual celebration of the county’s lakes. “Take a State in the Lakes “09” is scheduled to kick off Saturday with the Clean Lakes Festival and last through June 21.

“It’s an exciting time,” said Sue Jones, watershed management coordinator for the county’s Office of Lakes and Watershed. “There is a renewed emphasis on the Yahara Lakes, despite a budget crisis.”

Leverance, from his boat bobbing on Turville Bay Wednesday morning, could not have been more enthusiastic about the beauty and the importance of the Yahara Lakes. His relationship with them goes back a long way. He spent years working on lake issues with the DNR but his delight in being on the water has not dimmed.

“Despite everything, and for as much as people complain about them, look at the resource they are,” Leverance said. “The fish that come out of these lakes are phenomenal. The recreational opportunities are phenomenal.”

Beneath Leverance’s boat, however, lurked one of the biggest reasons some people no longer spend as much time on Madison’s lakes. In the aquarium-clear water rose strands of weeds, mostly Eurasian watermilfoil. In early June, the invasive plant was already beginning to sprout the canopy of vegetation that would spread, shading native plants and creating a maddening tangle for boaters and anglers.

Though it may seem so, Eurasian watermilfoil has not always been here. It arrived in the U.S. as early as the 1940s from Europe and Asia and was once sold commonly as an aquarium plant. It showed up in the Madison lakes in the 1960s. It grows rapidly and can dramatically alter a lake’s ecology by hogging nutrients needed by native plants and destroying habitat with its dense mats.

It is important, Leverance said, to distinguish between an invasive such as milfoil and native lake plants. The invasives have given all plants a bad name, according to Leverance, and he cringes when he hears everything growing in the lakes described as “weeds.”

“The first thing I’d like to do is get away from calling everything weeds,” said Leverance. “I’d prefer to call them aquatic plants.”

Using a long rake, Leverance pulled up numerous native plants and displayed their delicate stems and leaves. Once there were probably as many as 20 different species of native aquatic plants in the Madison lakes, Leverance said. That’s probably down to 12 or so, plants with names such as leafy pondweed, water stargrass and common waterweed. Just as a healthy forest boasts a thriving diversity of understory plants, healthy lakes should be home to a diverse population of aquatic plants that help filter nutrients and pollutants and  provide habitat and food for fish and other aquatic creatures.
Eurasian watermilfoil and other invasives destroy that diversity, Leverance said.

Thus the research project that had Leverance motoring about Turville Bay Wednesday. Leverance had marked off the corners of two 5-acre plots that were being worked by two of the county’s big lake weed harvesters.

All together there are seven of the 5-acre experimental plots in the bay, which was chosen because nearby points of land keep the water fairly calm. In addition to the two plots on which milfoil is being cut early in the spring, two others are being treated in the early spring with the herbicide 2,4-D. Three other plots are being left alone as controls that will allow researchers to monitor changes in the other four.

The idea is to see whether herbicide treatment or early weed cutting — or a combination of both — will reduce the growth of milfoil enough to allow the growth of native plants. Results from last year showed a measurable decrease in the growth of milfoil in the chemically treated plots. High water levels, cold temperatures and high winds complicated the findings on the weed-cutting plots last spring so this year’s results are highly anticipated.

Such research, Jones said, is crucial if we are to help Madison’s lakes go from “green to clean,” the theme of Saturday’s Clean Lakes Festival.

“These are complex systems,” Jones said. “The solutions are complex. But we always want to base what we do on science. And that’s what we’re doing here.”