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Data & Services

Data Extraction & Upload

You have years of lake data in a shoebox. This is how it gets into the portal.

$50

Checkout arrives with the store connection. Orders attach to the lake on your account.

Overview

A scheduled half hour with the Lake Pulse team to work out how to get your existing lake data into your portal — and then a plan to do it.

Spreadsheets, decades of volunteer Secchi readings, a consultant's PDF reports, state agency downloads, handwritten logbooks. Most lakes have more history than they realise, sitting in formats nobody can chart.

The $50 covers the consultation. If the job turns out to need substantial extraction work — hundreds of scanned pages, an unusual format — you will get a quote for that before anything happens.

What you get & how it's done

You get

  • Your historical lake data, digitized and loaded into your lake's Data Library
  • Source documents filed in Documents & Reports

How it's produced

Inputs
Your reports, spreadsheets, and lab sheets
Done by
Lake Pulse Boathouse data team
Process
Values extracted and standardized; original dates, methods, and labs kept with each value; checked against the source
Turnaround
Straightforward uploads within 5 business days of the call; larger jobs quoted first
Product category
  • ServiceBy the Lake Pulse Boathouse
  • Delivered digitally

    Turnaround you schedule the call at checkout. most calls happen within a few business days. straightforward uploads are completed within 5 business days of the call; larger jobs are quoted first.

  • Delivery

    Delivered to your Portal — no shipping, no waiting on a box.

  • SKU

    LP-BH-DATA-001

Turnaround

You schedule the call at checkout. Most calls happen within a few business days. Straightforward uploads are completed within 5 business days of the call; larger jobs are quoted first.

What problem does this solve for our lake?

  • A long record is the single most valuable asset a lake community owns, and it is almost always the worst-maintained one. It sits across a retired volunteer's spreadsheets, a folder of consultant PDFs, a state database export, and a filing cabinet.
  • Why it matters: everything interesting in lake science is a trend. A single phosphorus result means very little; twenty years of them tells you whether your lake is degrading, stable, or recovering, and it is the difference between a grant application that gets funded and one that does not. Historical data is also the only baseline you will ever have — you cannot go back and collect 2006.
  • The barrier is almost never willingness. It is that nobody knows how to get a scanned 1998 report into a chart, and the volunteer who understood the spreadsheet has moved away.

What's included?

  • 30 minutes of scheduled time with the Lake Pulse team
  • Review of what you have — formats, date ranges, parameters, condition
  • A realistic assessment of what can be brought in cleanly and what cannot
  • A plan for mapping your parameters onto the Lake Pulse data structure so the history charts alongside new results
  • Straightforward, well-structured data uploaded as part of this consultation
  • A written quote first, if the volume or condition of your records means substantial extraction work

What's not included

  • Unlimited data extraction. Large or difficult jobs — hundreds of scanned pages, handwriting, unusual instrument formats — are quoted separately after the call.
  • Data recovery from damaged or illegible originals
  • Interpretation of what your historical data means. That is Boathouse Support.
  • Re-analysis or quality assurance of results collected by others
  • Retrospective creation of data that was never collected

Requirements

  • Whatever you have, sent ahead — even if it is a photograph of a page. Format matters less than you think; volume and legibility matter more.
  • The date range and parameters, roughly. "Secchi and phosphorus, 2004 to now, with gaps" is enough to scope from.
  • Someone who knows the history of the record, if such a person still exists. Knowing that the sampling site moved in 2011 is worth more than the data itself.
  • A Plus, Lake Admin, or PRO subscription for the data to be loaded into your lake's account
What you get back

Results

  • Your historical record loaded into your lake's Data Library, alongside current results rather than in a separate archive
  • Long-term trends made chartable — the view a single test can never give you
  • A defensible baseline for grant applications, agency conversations, and treatment decisions
  • A permanent home for records that currently depend on one volunteer's filing cabinet
  • Data can be charted in the Analytics Hub, used to trigger alerts, or shared across your lake community
  • Results are found in your lake's portal, accessible only to Plus, Lake Admin, and PRO subscription tiers

Pro tips

  • Send it messy. Do not spend three weekends tidying a spreadsheet before the call — the team has seen worse, and reformatting by hand often destroys information.
  • Photographs of pages are fine to scope from. Legibility is the constraint, not file format.
  • Find the person who remembers. A moved sampling site, a changed lab, or a switched method makes a trend look real when it is not. That context is not in the data.
  • Prioritise the longest series, not the most recent. Twenty years of Secchi disk readings beats two years of a full chemistry panel for almost every question that matters.
  • Do it before a grant cycle, not during. Assembling a historical baseline under deadline is how records get quoted wrong.
  • At $50 this is close to free. The reason it is not free is that it is a scheduled commitment of someone's time, and free calls do not get prepared for.
Results sync to the Portal for Plus, Lake Admin, and PRO subscribers

Results from this product land in your lake's shared record in the Portal — next to everything else your lake has ever measured, instead of in an inbox.

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About this service

Data services organize, standardize, and interpret information, much of it created by others. Historical data is carried forward as recorded in the source documents, with original dates, methods, and laboratories noted where available; Lake Pulse does not alter reported values and does not re-verify the accuracy of third-party data. Interpretation reflects the data available at the time and reasonable professional judgment, in accordance with best practices. It is not an engineering, legal, financial, appraisal, or regulatory determination. Recommendations are options to consider; decisions, and responsibility for any action taken, rest with you.

Questions on this?

Our team can help you choose the right solution for your lake, explain how results sync to your Portal, or point you to the right subscription.

Contact us

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