Lake Waccamaw covers roughly 9,000 acres in Columbus County, North Carolina.

Of all the lakes we’re studying, two seem like they should be the most closely related: Jones Lake and Salters Lake, both a little north of Elizabethtown in Bladen County.

When you look at an aerial map of coastal North Carolina, you might notice something unusual in the eastern part of the state: dozens of oval-shaped lakes, often clustered together, that point towards the northwest.

When we first started planning for the Lake Level Monitoring Project, we knew we wanted to examine how water levels were changing in natural lakes, rather than man-made lakes that are generally highly monitored and managed for their intended purpose, whether it’s flood control or water storage.