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Along the shores of lakes across the U.S., homes both rustic and modern hide beneath the trees, sheltering lake lovers seeking natural quiet and recreation. These human settlements, bucolic though they may be, could have negative impacts on freshwater lakes, including a greater likelihood of cyanobacteria blooms and invasive species, as well as the health risks associated with these blooms and invasives. 

They’re also hidden from satellite view, making it challenging to count them and quantify their impact on water quality.

Until now. A new  from �鶹��’s  details how, by combining remote satellite imagery with detailed housing data from the U.S. Census, researchers can get a closer, more accurate look at housing and human activity near lakes. 

“Knowing where people and their ‘camps’ are along inland lakes provides public health agencies with more comprehensive data to assess the risks posed by recurrent water quality problems or persistent cyanobacterial blooms,” says Carsey senior demographer , lead author of the brief.

In an effort Johnson calls powerfully multidisciplinary, the research blends demography with the forest biometrics (, professor of natural resources and the environment), geographic information system analysis (, Carsey senior GIS technician), and aquatic biology (, professor of biology at Dartmouth College). 

The team merged fine-scale housing data from the decennial U.S. Census with land cover data from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) to study lakes in 10 counties in Northern New England and the Upper Great Lakes region.

Their analysis demonstrates that demographically enhanced land cover data represent a significant improvement in finding this “hidden housing” around lakes in forested regions. This measure improves researchers’ ability to examine both the effects of human settlement on lake quality and the impacts of water quality on people residing near the lake. 

“We hypothesize that analyses of lake water quality based solely on the NLCD might substantially underestimate human impact,” says Johnson. “We need more research, but accounting for the impacts of this hidden housing is both timely and important given significant human settlement impacts from impervious surfaces, fertilizer application, and septic systems.” 

The Carsey brief, “Forests, Lakes, and ‘Hidden’ Housing,” summarizes research published in the journal . The research was funded by the , the , and .