The Data Gap Is Real
Most lakes in America are tested once every few years — if they're tested at all. State agencies don't have the budgets or the boots on the ground to change that. Anglers are already on the water every day.
Freshwater monitoring in the U.S. is underfunded and inconsistent. The EPA's National Lakes Assessment covers roughly 1,000 lakes on a five-year cycle. Minnesota alone has more than 11,000 lakes. The math doesn't work.
When contamination events happen — Superfund sites, agricultural runoff, PFAS plumes — the baseline data often doesn't exist to prove what changed. The Wausau Ground Water Contamination site in central Wisconsin has been on the National Priorities List since 1985. Forty years later, new PFAS contamination is still being discovered in the same watershed, and the data to track its spread in real time doesn't exist outside of periodic agency sampling.
Nemo's Eye doesn't replace agency monitoring. It fills the gaps between scheduled tests with continuous, GPS-tagged, anonymized water quality readings from anglers who are already on the water. Dissolved oxygen, temperature at depth, turbidity, barometric pressure — collected passively, every session, from every lake an angler fishes.
Privacy is structural
The system strips all identifying data at the app level before anything leaves the device. Only anonymous water quality readings are ever contributed. Your identity is never part of the dataset.
That's not a policy — it's how the system is built.
You don't do anything extra
The same smart probe that helps you find fish are collecting environmental data in the background. There's no extra step, no opt-in workflow, no survey to fill out. You fish. The data happens.
Cooperative data shared through established research frameworks.