LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. (NEWS10) – In 1980, The FUND for Lake George split off from the Lake George Association, and since then, the two groups have both worked to protect the lake from invasive species and pollution, and better educate those who live around it on how to preserve the Queen of American lakes.

They’ll keep doing that, but they’ll be doing it together again.

On Thursday, the two groups announced that they would be re-merging into a new Lake George Association, keeping all of the members of both groups and folding them and their resources into one.

Two major motivators behind the agreement came to Lake George last summer.

One was the appearance of a harmful algal bloom in the lake’s southern bays, which can be toxic to swimmers and boaters; and the other was the emergence of the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, an invasive insect that preys on hemlock trees.

Both groups have worked with the New York DEC on handling those issues.

Another group handling the algal bloom is the Jefferson Project, which the FUND for Lake George created in cooperation with Rochester Polytechnic Institute and IBM Research. The project uses satellites, analytics and digital modeling to predict and analyze changes to the lake.

Projects like that are fresh on the minds of everyone in the newly-formed group, which is already in talks with municipalities like Lake George, Bolton Landing and Queensbury about helping create policy that would help those towns better protect the environments around them.