Add wildfire, climate change to the list of Lake Whatcom worries

As for those less-than-dramatic pollution results, Angela Strecker, Western Washington University’s director of the Institute for Watershed Studies, explained that measures of phosphorus, dissolved oxygen and algae blooms were more or less stable, although phosphorus appeared to be declining from a peak around 2010.

Dissolved oxygen went up significantly in 2023, but Stecker cautioned that one year does not make a trend.

“It is promising to see kind of this bump up of oxygen over time, and so that’s something that we’ll be keeping an eye on in the years to come,” Strecker said.