DNR, stakeholders to draft new Lake of the Woods management plan
Nov. 24—BAUDETTE, Minn. — The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is gearing up to draft a new five-year management plan for Lake of the Woods.
According to Matt Skoog, area fisheries supervisor for the DNR in Baudette, the plan, which will guide fisheries management on the big lake from 2024 to 2029, will replace a five-year management plan developed in 2017 with assistance from a 14-member stakeholders group.
The Lake of the Woods Fisheries Input Group includes tourism interests, commissioners from Roseau and Lake of the Woods counties, area business owners and anglers. Most of the same group members will assist in drafting the new plan, Skoog said, which includes goals and objectives for maintaining Lake of the Woods as a quality multispecies fishery and sampling protocols for monitoring the fish population.
The group will hold its first meeting in early December, and the hope is to meet two or three times before the end of February and have a draft of the new management plan available for public comment in March, Skoog said.
"We'll really be diving into starting to look at the various aspects of the management plan," he said. "We're obviously looking to go back and look at everything, just do our due diligence, on making sure that the management actions we're taking are still sound actions.
"What do they actually mean in regards to the health of the fishery?"
It's possible, he said, that many aspects of the existing plan won't change.
"We're taking a fresh look at (everything), as you should any time you update a management plan," he said.
Regulation changes aren't in the works, but they will be looked at as part of the process for updating the management plan, Skoog said.
"We're not necessarily looking at making changes, but at this point, we're not ruling them out if something comes up that makes sense, and it would be beneficial for the fishery," he said. "At this point, we're at kind of in the infancy stage of this, so we will make those decisions as the process progresses."
Summer fishing pressure on Lake of the Woods was similar to last year but down slightly, while walleye harvest was basically unchanged, based on results from the DNR's summer creel survey. Anglers logged about 600,000 hours of fishing time on the big lake, and kept about 175,000 pounds of walleyes, Skoog said.
"Both were below average, but kind of in line with where we were at last year," he said, adding there's "a little bit more uncertainty" with the summer estimate because the DNR was unable to fill a creel clerk position for the months of August and September. "It increases the (margin of) error on that estimate, but the numbers are right in line with what we've been seeing the last few years or close to it."
By comparison, anglers logged an estimated 3.2 million hours of time on the ice during the winter of 2022-23, keeping 94,200 pounds of walleyes and 121,094 pounds of saugers. Anglers during the winter of 2021-22 kept an estimated 160,000 pounds of walleyes and 260,000 pounds of saugers.
The estimated walleye harvest of about 270,000 pounds, based on results from the DNR's winter and summer creel surveys, is about half the DNR's "target harvest" of 540,000 pounds on a six-year moving average.
The current six-year average annual walleye harvest is about 475,000 pounds.
