Johanna Lake

Johanna Lake earns a C — middle-of-the-pack water quality, with one or two parameters dragging the average down from a stronger grade. With clarity and phosphorus scored, the sub-grades cluster within a letter of each other, pointing to stable conditions rather than one specific stressor.

Eutrophic conditions are the baseline here: clarity drops noticeably in late summer, and dissolved oxygen near the bottom can become a concern. A maximum depth of just 10 ft means sediment-bound phosphorus releases back into the water column whenever wind stirs the bottom — a classic shallow-lake dynamic. Johanna Lake covers 1,399 acres alongside 14.6 miles of shoreline, large enough that conditions can vary meaningfully between bays. Among the 25 graded lakes in Pope County, Johanna Lake sits at rank 11, above the county median.

Johanna Lake has no invasive species recorded in Minnesota state databases as of 2024, though prevention practices still apply at all access points. Walleye are documented at Johanna Lake, one of 11 fish species on record for the lake. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA public-access list. Monitoring depth is thin here: the LakeGrade rubric is applied to a small number of sample years, and the grade will be revised as more data accumulates.