Florida Lake Water Quality

Florida lists 3,122 lakes across 64 counties, 1,726 of them with a recent water-quality reading. Most of that sampling flows through monitoring run by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which feeds state, federal, and volunteer measurements into the EPA Water Quality Portal. The remainder are here because they are real named lakes, not because anyone has sampled them recently. Low nutrient readings are less common among Florida's measured lakes. The smaller, agricultural-watershed lakes that dominate the measured set tend to carry persistent phosphorus loads.

Lake Okee Rim Canal is the largest lake in this index at about 467,200 acres, one of 59 here that clear 500 acres. The rest run smaller, and small and shallow is where nutrient loading shows up first, because there is less water to dilute it and the bottom sediment stays within reach of the sun. The measured lakes lean eutrophic, with enough nutrient input to support an active algal community and the trade-offs in clarity and dissolved oxygen that come with it. The county with the lowest nutrient and algae readings on average is Bay. The gap between counties is large enough that a single figure for Florida lake water quality hides real local variation.