Resources

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.

Master Plans are a community driven documents that provides leaders and residents with a vision of their future physical development. These plans guide decisions and are regularly evaluated as conditions within the community change. In Michigan, Master Plans are the basis for zoning ordinances which are laws. Zoning must be based on a reasonable community plan. So while Master Plans are guides, they are also the legal foundation for local land use laws. Most St. Clair County communities use Master Plans. A compendium of these plans can be found at the link below.