**9. Conclusions**

Until the early 2000s, the history of monitoring lakes in the United States had been a succession of reactive efforts to assess particular stressors to determine how widespread they were and what policies, if any, should be adopted to tackle them. This strategy was moderately effective with domestic point source discharges like sewage treatment plants and with the deposition of acidic compounds as a result of sulfur and nitrogen compounds into the atmosphere. But many stressor-response problems are more complex, both in regional distribution and in likely causes. The NLA was initiated in 2007 to provide a more holistic and comprehensive approach to monitoring the quality of our lakes and the stressors impacting them while still allowing a platform to track specific lake stressors of concern as they emerge.
