Quoted: Steve Carpenter, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of its Center for Limnology, describes phosphorus management as the ?keystone? issue for healthy lakes. ?If we can get phosphorus under control,? he said, ?we have a much better shot at dealing with all of the other problems that the lakes have,? like invasive species, which can swoop in when a lake?s nutrient levels are unbalanced. There are ways to slow the gush of phosphorus into nearby lakes, such as contour plowing and winter cover crops, but Carpenter explains that the phosphorus load has gotten so high that those kinds of strategies ?almost don?t matter anymore.? Instead, we have to remove phosphorus from the system entirely.
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