The District Manager of the Seine/Rat River Conservation District is pleased to see more municipalities are paying to have Lidar scans done. Lidar stands for light detection and ranging and is a system that is used to map out the surface of the earth. Jodi Goerzen says it's a big help in evaluating drainage issues.

"The Lidar gives us the detailed elevation. So it allows us to model the whole watershed and look at where the best places are to hold back water to increase the productivity of agricultural land and also to protect the communities and the infrastructure and also to allow the water to filter down into the aquifers, rather than running off, which reduces nutrients, beyond belief, to Lake Winnipeg."

Goerzen notes it's getting harder to find landowners who are willing to allow some of their land to be used to store water during spring runoff or major rain events.

"It's getting a little trickier. As land prices increase, everyone seems to want to make the most of every square piece of their land which is absolutely understandable. We would all do the same thing. So we're looking at a model with providing an incentive payment to a landowner so it could help them out with saying, yes, they're providing a community benefit by holding water back on their land during high water events for two days to four days or three months, depending on what they want."

Goerzen says they previously were looking for fairly large areas to hold back water but are changing the focus to look for smaller retention areas just upstream of trouble spots. She adds it's not too hard to know where many of the trouble spots are.

"Anywhere there's a road washing out, that kind of flags a problem area. If there's water over the road, maybe we can hold back water upstream of that washout. That's kind of the way we're looking at it now."

Meanwhile, she says it's been a busy summer for the conservation district doing maintenance on some water retention projects, helping develop rain gardens and putting together a surface water inventory and an inventory of culverts in the district.