INTRODUCTION

This guide is prepared for homeowners on Lake Santa Fe & Little Lake Santa Fe to provide knowledge on how the way in which we maintain our property affects health of these beautiful lakes. This guide is designed with the belief that all of us who live on these lakes, love their natural beauty. The hope is that given the understanding of how we affect the health of these lakes, we will all try to do our part to minimize our personal impacts on these lakes and help maintain them for the enjoyment of future generations.

Lake Santa Fe & Little Lake Santa Fe have been a home to humans for 10,000 years or more. Many of us have likely seen the evidence of this in the numerous artifacts found around these lakes. This provides proof that people have lived in balance with these lakes for thousands of years. However, in the last 100 or so years, human impact on these lakes has increased at a rapid rate. This is evidenced by the rapid increase in homes, loss of shoreline canopy, clearing of aquatic vegetation, dredging of canals and construction of seawalls. More recently, as these lakes have become a more affluent place to live, bigger houses are being built, more shoreline vegetation is being removed, boat traffic has increased and nutrient input from lawn fertilization and septic systems has increased.

Some may ask "Why is this a problem?", "This is a big lake, how can the work I do on my small property affect these large lakes?" However, to be fair, we must consider that whatever we do on our property or to our shoreline can be done by all other property owners on these lakes. For instance, if homeowner decides that it is OK for them to clear all the aquatic plants on their shoreline, they are in essence saying it is OK for all homeowners to clear their entire shoreline. Given that most of the shoreline of these lakes borders on private property, clearly the loss of this vegetation and wildlife habitat would have a tremendous impact on this lake (more on the importance of shoreline vegetation later). Luckily the majority of us do currently understand the importance and beauty of shoreline vegetation. A journey around these lakes provides many excellent examples of people who do maintain their shoreline vegetation in a natural condition.

Many of us are not the original homeowners on our property. Therefore, much of the adverse impacts to these lakes might have been the result of the previous homeowners activities. This situation provides you with the opportunity to correct past mistakes. Given proper attention, many of these impacts can be reversed. It should be the goal of all homeowners to reduce the impact of their properties on these lakes. Those homeowners who have pristine shorelines should be praised and encouraged to continue to be good stewards of our lakes. Hopefully if they sell their property, they will impress upon the new owner, the need to maintain this pristine condition for the good of the lakes.