resources

The Governments of Canada and the United States are pleased to release the 2019 State of the Great Lakes Highlights Report, which provides an overview of the status and trends of the Great Lakes ecosystem. Overall, Great Lakes water quality is assessed as “fair and unchanging.” While progress to restore and protect the Great Lakes has occurred, including the reduction of toxic chemicals, challenges cited in the report include invasive species and excess nutrients that contribute to toxic and nuisance algae. 

As large-scale restoration plans for degraded aquatic habitats evolve, it is essential that multiorganizational collaborations have a common vision to achieve consensus on restoration goals. Development of restoration targets and postrestoration monitoring strategies can be focused using a viability analysis framework that supports an adaptive management process.  Resource managers in the corridor can use these results to identify knowledge gaps, research and restoration priorities, and to assess progress towards meeting restoration goals.

Welcome to the Great Lakes Coastal Wetlands online explorer, provided by Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI). Through a binational collaborative project between Canada and the United States, the team has been working to better measure and map coastal wetland features and hydrologic changes through time at fine resolution. Several remote sensing derived products have been developed for monitoring wetland type, extent and inundation of Great Lakes coastal wetlands.

The Great Lakes Regional Water Use Database provides comparable water use information on withdrawals, diversions and consumptive uses. This database supports the states and provinces in implementing Article 4 of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact and Article 301 of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its federal partners are developing Action Plan III, which will outline priorities and goals for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Action (GLRI) for fiscal years 2020-2024.

PalEON (the PaleoEcological Observatory Network) is an interdisciplinary team of paleoecologists, ecological statisticians, and ecosystem modelers. This network works to reconstruct forest composition, fire regime, and climate in forests across the northeastern US and Alaska over the past 2000 years and then use this to drive and validate terrestrial ecosystem models. These vegetation maps display high-resolution settlement-era forest composition, based on witness tree and General Land Office data, for the Northeastern United States and Alaska.

The Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant (IISG) funds research projects related to the use, development, and conservation of Lake Michigan coastal resources in Illinois and Indiana.

Beginning January 2010, Wisconsin's local and regional governments must base decisions that affect zoning, official mapping, and subdivision regulations on an adopted comprehensive plan [s.66.1001 Wisconsin Statutes]. As a result, an increasing number of communities are adopting new plans or updating existing plans to be consistent with the new laws. The Great Lakes Coastal Community Planning site is meant to be used a tool to support planning efforts along the Lake Michigan and Lake Superior coasts of Wisconsin.