shift but a move into looking at more say aquatic plants or macro
invertebrates that's really intensive work so if you can save a little bit of
time doing the regular sampling that's that's worth a lot of that's really a
good thing
second is assess the sampling frequency and again that was my pointing out do we
have to go out two times a month or can we just go out one time a month and
finally number three performed trend analysis to determine if water quality
over since 1997 is getting better getting worse or we just can't detect a
change for all those bays and those lakes
any questions so far okay so again I think the first goal I think I might
have gone into this little bit do adjacent bays have similar water quality so you
know you could say if two adjacent bays are have similar water quality at least
statistically maybe you can only you can sample one bay every year but that
second bay maybe every three years or something like that to see if there's
any changes locally again a lot of resource savings time staff cost could
potentially come out of this so again bays that were a reasonable
close proximity we clustered those so we're not going to
compare Halsted Bay to Gray's Bay because they're miles and miles apart so
you'll see on the next several slides how we kind of clustered those these
areas that they you know reasonably put a reasonable potential for these bays to
mix so you can see in the southwestern part of Lake Minnetonka the circles so
we compared those lake monitoring stations together and you know we had a
half a dozen of them and different parts of the lake that were seemingly had a
reasonable chance of being connected to one another either through vast open
water or through you know inlets that go between the bays
so I want to go and explain this these graphs or these tables excuse me so in
the upper left you'll see Priests Bay on the sort of the far left and then well
if I'm getting filmed I'm gonna go up here is there such a thing as film
anymore tape so we're looking at we're comparing
Priests Bay in a given year see 2004 that water quality dated from 2004
versus Halsted Bay now here's Halsted Bay and then there's that
little gap or little passageway under there I think it's under 101 and then
this small area is called pre space so it's reasonable to assume that there
might be some kind of mixing going on there a lot of the flow of the water and
Minnetonka's goes this way and of course goes off the dam so if we look at total
phosphorous for the year 2004 and compare those two Bay's is there a is
there a difference between those values and for example here if you see these
little asterisks or stars that would say yes statistically we can say there's a
big difference if there's not a difference between the water quality
between those two bays for example that same year for the secchi disk
transparency so in 2004 you can't tell a statistical difference between these two
bays and that's where all this yellow shows I'm not significant so basically
here we're looking at halsted which flows into priests
there's cook's bay west upper lake and then Smithtown bay you know I think we
also had Phelps Bay in there too so basically the results said that
Halston or excuse me Halsted Bay is a lot different than any of the others
it's pretty unique it's the end of a lot of chain of lakes especially in Carver
County that flow and just through Six Mile Creek down by St. Bonifacius and
you've got that pinch point there where the bridge is so a lot of what gets into
Halsted can stay in there and kind of incubate roll out of algae now priests
bay flows into cooks bay you start seeing it's still quite a bit different
there's a big difference between this bay and this bay but once you get out
into here there's really not a whole lot of difference so that's kind of might
suggest that there you know a lot of this stuff is just kind of mixing and
blowing around not blowing around but just mixing and you could argue that
well why would you sample all of these bays when you could just sample one or
drop one of them out and as you'll see later we'll talk about some
possibilities for reducing certain sampling frequencies for example this
Smithtown Bay way down where Lake Minnewashta and it flows down into Lake
Virginia which flows into the Smithtown Bay and one of the recommendations later
on in the talk will be you know maybe you can drop this station out and you
could almost save 2 to 4 hours a week just getting there because you know the
boat ramps aren't very close to that one so you have to travel a long distance
and back so moving on looking at this what I call
the south central area Spring Park Bay and a black lake in there
Phelps Carmen and I tossed in Lafayette because you know kind of the connection
between Carmen and that and really I think what really came out of here was
that black lake's kind of unique it's very shallow it's kind of a little
passageway to get jump around from laked sections of the
but Phelps in Spring Park Bay and to a certain extent this Carmen Bay they're
kind of it's kind of mixed as well so there's the possibility of reducing some
sampling frequency there as well so you know market I'll pick up the the pace
here too we really don't need to go in as much detail if you look on the
northwest part of the lake over near Mound basically a Painter Creek will
flow down in through to Jennings Bay which is quite a I have it on there
where's Jennyings Bay yeah upper left it's a lot of those lakes down there the
lower left circle the northwestern area they're not not very different from one
another they're you know they're kind of all mixing together except for total
phosphorous that's the outlet of Painter Creek goes into Jennings Bay and you see
a lot of phosphorous in in Jennings Bay but that doesn't seem to be making it
down Lake into West Arm or Harrison's which is interesting I mean that's some
one thing that could come out of that I looked at a Crystal Bay as well because
there's kind of that little outlet into Crystal Bay and there's no it's
completely different system at that point so if you look at the Crystal Bay
you don't see a lot of yellow on that figure so it means it's a unique unique
from those other systems bays Jennings Harrison Western the north-central area
Stubbs Maxwell North Arm through in Lower Lake North and Crystal just for
fun basically it's as Stubbs is a pretty unique Stubbs Bay is the terminus of Clausen's
Creek and then there's a little pinch point and then you get into
Maxwell Bay so in a sense it's showing that Maxwell and North Arm are quite
alike and that's kind of shown here because
they're not significant you see the yellow it means those two bays or a lot
of like least statistically so again there's an opportunity to say reduce
sampling frequency for one or two of those bays northeastern area the why is
that a bay or like north and also a couple little funny lakes just before
the lake Minnetonka Tanager Lake Peavey Lake results showing those things are
kind of an animal to themselves they're pretty unique but Wayzata Bay lower Lake
north and then Grays Bay it's gonna represent it here there's not much
difference between all those and finally sort of the southeastern area you know
Excelsior kind of wrapping around you know a lot of these bays St. Albans Bay
they're really not a lot of significant differences and that doesn't necessarily
mean that they're mixing with one another but they could be it's just that
by the time you get to the eastern part of the lake the water quality is so much
better than the other part of the lake and the values of phosphorus and
chlorophyll are pretty low you can't statistically tell differences between
the two so that's that's my interpretation of those results
frequency the second goal is again do we need to sample these Lakes Bay's twice a
month or once once a month to assess the health and you can recall PCA wants you
to look at data from June through September but it doesn't specify how
many you should sample so you know you could sample once a month and still
assess compliance or impairment so I thought okay well look at that and I
want to preface this by saying that you know earlier on in the talk is I
mentioned sowed some green and blue squares some like some bays some years
had four to seven samples some had eight or more that's how many
of the color distinction so that gave me the opportunity to say okay let's just
look at all the data points in describe all data points so early June late June
July there's your eight points and well what
if I just took all the early points and looked at that data so you just take all
the early ones so it's four data points well what if we took just the late it's
just what if we went out to a lake and just sampled the second half of the
month and the idea was a couple things you know do we need to sample eight
times a year or just four times a year and if so does it make a difference with
the example the first part of the month or the last part of the month so again
I'm gonna walk you through this short short one here this is just Jennings Bay
again in the northwest part of the Minnetonka's Lake Minnetonka area say
1987 if I compared all eight data points during this summer
versus just the fours at the start of the month of each of those month if I
compared all those eight data points versus those last half of the month
before I compared just the four points at the first half this is the last half
of the month can't psyche chlorophyll total phosphorus no difference
statistically it doesn't matter if you sample four times a year or eight that's
what this is saying the one star that was in 2005 for total phosphorus it just
happened to be that if you sample at the start of the month versus the end of the
month there was a difference so then this one will blind you basically if
it's gray there weren't any data points to compare if it's yellow
there's no difference and if you see these little blue stars that means there
were differences and there's only about a dozen out of
I don't know how many hundreds of comparisons we did and they all seemed
to do most I think all of them except maybe one we're the first half of the
month versus the second half of the month why that is I went back and look
inside didn't really show anything popped out but I guess the point is you
know the overwhelming majority and again this is in all the lakes this is what
you're looking at some more rich nutrient-rich eutrophic areas like
Jennings Bay but you're also looking at some cleaner areas Wayzata Bay and then
looking at all five excuse me eleven uh portion watershed lakes you
know so you're going from really clean systems to really you know more
nutrient-rich systems and just the take home is is you know statistically it
doesn't matter if you sample twice a month or once a month
finally the trend analysis is a bay or a lake water quality getting better is it
getting worse or can't we check detect a difference and we use four approaches
one is just the straight water quality data you know you go out and collect
your sample you get a data point that's what we look at but we were also
interested in well what if it's really wet year or what if it's a really cool a
really hot year or cold year dry year wet year so that's all these other
things mean data adjusted for runoff or precipitation or temperature that's
that's what we were trying to see if there is an effect of temperature on the
trends you know kind of adjust for those factors then finally there were some
those six bays I believe had some early 1980s data I thought well let's just
look at those in the early 80s versus the last seven eight years so apologize
for the smallest here these these are the upper watershed lakes again you can
walk through this kind of just use the straight data or we
adjusted it for runoff precipitation or air temperature and we'll just look at
this column basically for Christmas Lake it's saying the water quality is getting
better From 1997 to 2012, there was a trend there. Dutch Lake, I don't know it appeared there was no significant difference, the dataset showed that it was improving Gleason is improving for phosphorus over that 1997 to 2012 period, Langdon was improving
couple columns here you know there's some lakes some years that were you have
such a huge outlier that it's like it just wrecks everything the data analysis
so adjusting some points showed that long lake had showed some improvement
Minnewashta showing a decrease in water quality with respect to transparency but
that didn't really show up in the chlorophyll or phosphorus data
Parley we weren't able to detect a change but Pierson's like on all
categories it's improved quite a bit that was a real success story
Wasserman and Schutz really haven't shown a lot of change but Virginia showed quite
a big increase in the chlorophyll or the algae in the water over that time period
if we look at some of the bays in Lake Minnetonka for the most part you know we
haven't really detect a lot of changes there's some areas where you've seen
improvements in total phosphorus phosphorus concentrations going down say
Black Lake Carson's Bay Gray's Bay Halsted you know a few there but it was
kind of what was interesting is there's a number of bays where chlorophyll was
getting worse getting increased values some of those it's
kind of related to the these some of these bays are really clean so to speak
you know really low algae in the first place so it doesn't take a lot very big
increase to show a statistical change so you might go from ten parts per million
to twelve or thirteen you know over time and you're gonna see a big boost or a
significant change now one of the things that's interesting it's kind of leading
into some more study is your phosphorus went down in Halsted Bay but your
chlorophyll went up typically the thoughts are you know you reduce the
phosphorus they all do you don't have any much phosphorus D so you eat or
consume so your chlorophyll goes down but in Halsted Bay that's not the
case and there's some evidence of that in Stubbs Bay as well you just the data
and I don't see Jen..Jennings is that kind of weird weird weird bay because it
has such high phosphorus in the first place because it's kind of a terminus of
Painter Creek so that's gonna that's leading into some work that I'm actually
doing right now and I'll talk about that a little bit we're pretty close to
finishing up here finally I want to talk about I mentioned that you know there
was six bays where he had a lot of data in the early 1980s and course pics
starting in 97 through the president we've got a lot of data so I thought
well let's just take this block of years here seven eight years you can compare
it to the most recent period and again you've got some very nutrient-rich
eutrophic bays and some very clean water bodies as well and I think what it
really shows is that phosphorous has gone down across the board from very
nutrient-rich systems and very nutrient poor systems which is very good again
Peavey's kind of an animal to itself it's kind of just this weird little small
lake pocket that's really deep and has a lot of salt in the bottom
weird so again you know you see some improvements in water clarity you know
some of this might be due to the fact that a lot of the likes cleaned up a lot
since they pointed the sewage treatment plants away from the lake but the fact
that it's being sustained over such a long time and showing that improvement
is really really encouraging so these are just some some some examples of or
some suggestions recommendations that you know we could reduce the amount of
sampling in certain bays in Lake Minnetonka for example I mentioned
Smithtown you know you drop that off the sampling schedule for a year or two or
three or take it out completely you could save half a day's travel time and
effort in that that's really significant and I have some other one suggestions
there as well the sampling frequency again you could sample once a month if
you're defining if your only goal is to look at well if one of your primary
goals is to look at compliance in the sense of the the PCA you know looking at
those four months in the summer for secchi chlorophyll and phosphorus trend
analysis upper watershed lake use the number of lakes improving others are
stable or we just weren't able to detect a significant difference but Virginia is
very interesting that it just seems to be going the wrong direction and be
curious to know why for like minute on instead of looking at the individual
bays I thought well let's just look at by water quality measure like total the
transparency so improving lakes or bays Peavey and Wayzata degrading my set Wayzata
but again one of the things that secchi disk transparency is it doesn't
have a huge range of values you know you could go down from you know really bad
conditions half a foot to you know maybe he's eight ten feet you know it may seem
like a big a big range but you know you might have high clarity transparency in
June versus really poor clarity when the algae starts growing late in the summer
so you know statistics you're comparing these average values i don't know like
like you're comparing two bell curves and if they're really wide and in fact
it's hard to tell a difference instead of having well this does anything to
help but it's just really difficult with secchi disk transparency to detect changes
for chlorophyll again there's surprising that a number of bays were
degrading but again as I mentioned some of them have a really low chlorophyll to
start with so they could go from about eight parts per billion average to
twelve you know you go out there and you look at the leg and it's like I don't
you know I can't tell any difference but I think that's what might be going on
there or may be signaling more long-term systemic changes you know it's just just
a possibility and finally the nutrient total phosphorus seeing a number of
bays improving and it's really good to see Halstead and Stubbs improving we you
know statistically we're showing an improvement which is very encouraging
because Halsted Jennings and Stubbs are really kind of they've always been the
kind of bugaboo because they're the terminus of some major stream systems
get a lot of you know runoff erosion possibly coming in through there in the
painter system used to have the maple plain treatment plant processed effluent
eventually working its way down degrading Peavey and just say any changes I
mentioned that trophic state index it's just kind of a amalgam of all those
phosphorus chlorophyll and secchi you didn't you know the only time you really
saw changes in that they were really associated with chlorophyll and
phosphorus so really you know using that for statistical test really was and
didn't show any improvement and again looking at early 80s versus last several
years we saw market improvement which is
very encouraging you know whether that's due to climate change whether it's due
to the efforts of the district and the cities and the counties in my opinion
it's like okay I don't wanna say who cares it's getting better but you know
the fact that it is showing an improvement is made suggest that you
know a lot of the efforts to curb the amount of erosion and runoff getting
into our lakes is making a difference future directions and this is what I'm
doing I've been doing right now actually started about a week ago is looking at
the monthly trend analysis you know so looking at the water quality in Wayzata
Bay in in June of 97 June of 1998 all the way to the present
and just kind of looking is there one month out of the summer that's really
the problem spot or you know just see if what jumps out might give us an idea you
know what type of tactics to take in certain areas of the of the lake
Minnetonka's watershed or the upper watershed lakes you know maybe we can
find that hey it's going on in spring or mid summer or late summer and also
I pointed out that sort of the problem the typical problem bays of Halsted
and Jennings and Stubbs Bay showing that you know we're getting phosphorus is
going down but we're having an increased chlorophyll and those are systems that
traditionally had high chlorophyll ohms to begin with so again I said I was in
progress here but just kind of a little teaser
this is Halsted Bay and I'll explain that here so up here this is secchi disk
or the clarity transparency 1997 to 2012 this is the clarity so higher up in the
graph means cleaner clearer water the yellow diamonds are represent what the
values are for the clarity in the month of June through this whole time period
and again you might only have one or two sometimes three data points available
for a given month so I didn't put error bars in here because it would look like
a Jackson Pollock painting so what you're really seeing here in hostage
you've got pretty good clarity in June you know you've got these higher these
are meters by the way so you know you've got eight seven eight nine feet of
clarity in June but in July that's when things are happy you know happening the
clarity just and you really can't see much of a difference between July August
and September all these stars and hexes and triangles chlorophyll that's another
thing I'm it's hard you know again I'm just throwing this up there I haven't
done any and really analysis on I'm just kind of picking it off here but seeing
low chlorophyll for the most part these yellow diamonds in June kind of
corresponds with the high transparency and then as the chlorophyll goes up the
transparency goes down and the question is is there a trend in time is it
getting worse through time and we showed that phosphorus
seems it's trending downward in the case chlorophyll
it's going up what's going on it's really straight it's hard you know I
have to get in there and dig through that one of the components of the study
I'm doing right now is really actually picking up some work I did when I was
still here at the district I'm like what's for example here Halsted Bay
Painter Creek comes in to Jennings Bay I looked at you know what was the
temperature what was the profile of temperature in Jennings Bay and the
creeks coming into it you know where was it injecting nutrients and so I've
always wanted to get back to that I always kept that file so another
component of what I'm doing is not only the trend analysis in all these bays and
lakes but also taking a really close look at the Jennings system the Halsted
bay system in the and a Stubbs Bay system and finally I should mention I'm
also looking we've also sampled really deep depth
phosphorus in a number of these bays and lakes over time but so the first part of
the project we didn't look at it so now I'm gonna be looking at that you know
it's a indication of internal loading of phosphorus which is a real problem in
some of the bays you know again is a phosphorus increasing over time
decreasing is there no trend so help us out and you know determining how we
manage certain lakes and bays where that internal phosphorus is a problem so I
think that's all I have right now I can take any any questions
the only thing I you know the one of the things that I'm thinking about is that
there was so much phosphorus and so much algae in those like Halsted Bay and if
I recall going out there it was really you know the water sometimes could be
kind of really dark brown tea colored a lot of peat you know is this the
wetlands that are coming part of the Six Mile Creek system and maybe some of the
efforts by you know controlling phsphorus you know erosion and runoff getting into the
Six Mile Creek system which ends up in Six mile maybe that has it has reduced
the phosphorus content but sort of in an ancillary way has enhanced the light
regime in the water so you still have a fairly large amount of phosphorous in
the water I mean for example here in Halsted Bay you know kind of look we
were talking you know it's still really eutrophic conditions you know you're
around 150 parts per billion now you're down to 100 yeah you know and recently
that's still really high but maybe it's kind of provided some a slight increase
in clarity that we can't really detect and it sort of opened an opportunity for
algae to grow it was like so stained water color and sort of murky and dark
down there maybe it's improving it's really hard to
tell it'd be nice you know hindsight if we would have measured something like
the suspended solids in the water column as well but
so you know we're gonna see what the data is telling us that's that's kind of
one theory I'm going on yeah that was kind of where before we talked about
adjusting it or waiting it for precipitation or temperature and
actually this analysis I'm doing now with sort of the monthly trends are
gonna do that again you know so is it a hot was it a hot June or cool June was
it a wet September or a dry September you know and just kind of adjust the
data and see if that makes a difference
which like you mentioned Gleason yeah I think well Gleason I think a lot of that might
have to do with the reasonably shallow lake plus the dealing with a curly leaf
and you know when you look at how much bounce the lake has over the summer
compared to the total volume of water typically it's not very much it really
doesn't have that pretty difference uh-huh so you know lakes are all alike
and lakes are all different you know there's just little things
hmm I really haven't really looked at that head and looked at that there's a
really part of the project you know you're just kind of there's so much data
that's you know it's there to start at this level and you know that might be
the next level to really start digging in and you know if it's temperature you
know just for sake of argument if it's temperature that was driving all this
you know it's like well we can do put a dome over the lake and the air
conditioners or I don't know so yeah it's it's really complicated yeah
it's nice when things you know pop out that are you know nice and clear it's
like oh okay that's what statistics you know initial
statistics analysis is trying to tease apart what the heck's going on so
temperature certainly could have a have an impact I mean I always like to say
the physical world drives the chemical and biological it's hard to overcome
gravity and temperature
well I think you'd have to do it on any system you know if it was just a single
system it wouldn't take a whole you know a ton of effort you know obviously here
we had 26 bays and 11 lakes and it was 20 years well 15 years of data so you
know collecting more day I mean there's is something statistically relevant or
something ecologically relevant you know like I said some of those bays in the
southeast part of the lake they had such low concentrations like you know if we
go from 8 to 10 parts per billion chlorophyll it's like ecologically it's
like you know it's not a big deal not a big deal but if you had like a shift in
the type of species from some nice diatoms to some nasty blue greens that's
that's a whole different ballgame so did you have a system you're thinking about
mm-hm yeah
yeah I mean to their recreational likes I mean people their beaches and people's
yeah it's be difficult to you know transfer
the results here to over there but you know we have a good data record it could
be you know if you pick it out pretty pretty easily well with the rules the
district has I don't think it's gonna have an impact yeah I think well you
know I can't really speak to it but just knowing the district they're not gonna
what to happen but they have to control through the rules you have to control a
certain amount of runoff so I don't know if anybody here can speak to that but
yeah I think you have to capture the first inch of runoff at least and
there's probably treatment trains you know going through swales and rain
gardens or something on it
it's got it's got to be an improvement cuz I know I think I remember talking to
my panzer once he said that you know when it was a shopping mall that the
parking lot kept sinking so they'd put another layer of asphalt on another lee
so he said I don't know how thick that asphalt is but it just keeps going ok um
I guess let's say here I guess we're really trying to fit you know here we're
just teasing the part the data just see you know where the problems are and the
entire you know the upper part of the district with regards to lake in lakes
and then in bays and really kind of zeroing in on things like where a
problem area is typically a vent or Jennings Halstead Stubbs but then as you
saw here Virginia popped out you know you know
figuring out what's going on there you know is there a problem in the channel
for me to washed it down there I mean there was a pump station on the east end
of the lake you know there's I think there's isn't there like a sewage line
that goes to a pump station on the west and your Easton is that leaky you know
they replace didn't they replace the bridge over or some bridge road over
there I mean it's really you know that itself is a complex system so as far as
you know teasing apart what what's really going on there in the lake versus
what's going on off outside of the lake I guess continued monitoring over time I
certainly wouldn't suggest reducing the frequency of that lake because it's such
a you know it's showing such interesting behavior is getting worse
that you know continuing the monitoring and then I think we got a good grasp on
what to do in the watershed to decrease any further degradation caused by the
runoff some of the analysis I'm doing now is looking at well what's down in
the deep waters of that Lake is it's so bad down there that you have to do some
type of in lake treatment you know just throwing out there's a alum treatment or
something like that you know that so that's what might come out of out of at
least the second phase of this data analysis it hasn't yeah so it you know
to my knowledge it's not officially tied to it whether it might be in the future
yeah well just you know the data kind of tells you is it really changing a lot
it's not changing much then there's certainly possibility that you can
reduce you know the sampling intensity again you know it's really the data
tells you what's going on and you know I don't know what to do that looks like
and things like that but you know I think it's about you know what other
honesty mandates of the district here was you know in the the 10-year plan was
you know we're gonna look at certain we're gonna use this water quality data
to look at trends in or you know changes or differences around the district and
never really got around to it so that's what I'm doing you know where the reason
I'm doing it but I think it's more is not necessarily better so let's kind of
look at a way to you know are we over sampling are we under
sampling you know can we provide some cost savings you know you know
everybody's busy you know and there's always new aquatic invasives you know
aquatic plants macro invertebrates I mean those things take a lot of time and
effort and so you know I think one of the benefits of this project is to see
okay can we lessen that load you know and still get the information we need
out of it I think we can hear yeah I mean
there's so much variability you know even just pick any lake you know there
might be an algal bloom in this part of the lake that just kind of started for
whatever reason and it's perfectly it's a lot clearer over in this part of the
lake but where did you go out and sample you know there's no way you're going to
sample every you can't go to a lake and sample 50 different spots I mean that's
just impractical so usually you go to the deep spot and that's what you do it
so if it can give you the information you need once a month great but you know
you need sort of an analysis to see if that's okay
you know justifiable yeah yeah this first half of it you know that this this
is going to the second we call it part two pretty original
I don't I don't I don't know but I just you know plotting some of the data I
just and just you know when I was here I was out on the lakes pretending to be a
grad stone I was younger I'm like oh my god I don't know the lake in April
raining and blowing and it's like trying to looking at this GPS trying to find
that hope I went passed it up I went past it but no just being out there you
know over the summer for a couple summers and I've actually been to all
these locations you just kind of noticed changes you know especially and say the
like Halsted's bay Jennings and Stubbs and all these lakes you know they didn't
tend to be clearer and spring and then you start getting your algae and as it
heats up in the summer so I don't know if anybody's really
yeah so you know you're probably getting a better estimate of the mean when you
look at all those cuz you get ten date-date to ten data points but these
they might be one point in 1997 for chlorophyll or something like that and
some there might be three some there might be two so the error around those
is pretty I guess you're putting a lot of faith in
the mean the value that you've got up there so of course if there's one point
you can't there's no error it's just the one point so anyway yeah I hope to pull
some pull some good stuff out of here
testing in the sense of it was part of that I think is part of again the PCA
the MPCA is compliant or e compliance they want though those four months
because that's you know typically when people are out there you know you're
going Memorial Day delay you know Labor Day and beyond but
anything else thanks thank you
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