Members of the National Marine Trades Council will head for the St. Croix River Valley in Minnesota July 22-25 for the group’s annual conference, hosted by the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas.

NMTC is the premier educational and networking group specifically for marine association leaders. The conference offers a unique format in which participants from around the country share ideas and information on the successes and failures of current programs while exploring new ideas for the year ahead.

The conference will be led by NMTC co-chairs Lori Wheeler, vice president of the Marine Industries Association of South Florida, and Randall Lyons, executive director of the Massachusetts Marine Trades Association. Traditionally, the conference is attended by leaders from more than 30 state and local marine trades associations.

The conference program shares information on two major areas of concern: reports of general member services programs, including state and local lobbying activities, that can be adapted in other areas of the country; and programs that have proven successful in drawing boat show attendees and producing product sales for exhibitors.

Smart Buoys

Lake Erie is the first of the five Great Lakes to employ a series of “smart” buoys that provide valuable data to researchers and anglers by simply connecting to the internet.

Called the Smart Lake Erie Watershed Initiative, it was created by the Cleveland Water Alliance, an Ohio group that protects and improves how the Great Lakes are used. The alliance works with a Cleveland engineering group, Freeboard Technology, to develop and deploy the smart buoys.

According to reporting by Daniel Schoenherr in Great Lakes Echo, the buoys provide information on water conditions, contaminants and nutrients. The information will better prepare the region for harmful algal blooms, oil spills and the consequences of climate change, said Ed Verhamme, president of Freeboard Technology. Eventually it will be available across all of the Great Lakes.

Smart Lake Erie is actually an infrastructure investment. “We really take for granted how easy it is on land to provide [cellular] coverage,” Verhamme says. “With this network, it’s going to be easier and cheaper to monitor the Great Lakes.”

Smart Lake Erie allows users to directly connect their devices through short-wave radio.

The goal is to have more than 300 sensors in buoys and cell towers in the network to provide 12,000 square miles of coverage. The complete project, Smart Great Lakes, will provide coverage to populated areas of Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Superior. Right now, about half of Lake Erie is covered with service available over 20 miles off Ohio.

Each buoy can monitor local weather and water conditions, such as temperature, depth and contaminant concentrations. Another proposed study would deploy small “drifters” that float through the water to map the path of algal blooms. The buoy network would relay their location and the local algae concentration in real time. The data would be publicly available.

The benefits to boating and fishing are obvious. Climate change, algae blooms and more can disturb the lake’s nutrient cycling, which is vital for organisms to survive.

According to Steve Ruberg, a researcher for the Observing Systems and Advanced Technology branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, collecting real-time data on water conditions using Smart Great Lakes could allow decision-makers and fisheries to respond to the effects of climate change faster. “There are folks making decisions about stocking additional fish and folks making decisions about trying to restore native fishes, such as whitefish. It could inform decisions like that,” Ruberg says.

Right now, most information collected on the water is retrieved from buoys about once a year. With the buoy network, the same information is available in an instant.