A Great Lakes Wetlands Decision Support System

Project Description

In 2005, Congress authorized the Great Lakes Restoration Act, a comprehensive management plan to addresses significant environmental problems affecting the Great Lakes ecosystem. The act established a 100,000-acre regional wetlands restoration goal in the Great Lakes region. To coordinate federal actions to achieve near term wetlands commitments in the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes Collaboration Wetlands Subcommittee was formed in 2006 with broad federal participation. This committee was created under the auspices of the Great Lakes Interagency Task Force for President Bush's Executive Order on the Great Lakes. This 2004 order obligated federal agencies working within the Great Lakes to collaborate on nationally significant environmental and natural resource issues involving the Great Lakes, including those outlined in the Great Lakes Restoration Act of 2005.

In support of the 100,000-acre restoration goal, the Wetlands Subcommittee has identified the need for a comprehensive, spatially-based tracking, monitoring, and reporting system to better manage and protect Great Lakes wetland complexes. At present, however, there exists no comprehensive system to track, monitor, and report on wetlands loss or degradation in the Great Lakes Region. The unavailability of such a geo-enabled system significantly impairs the region's ability to diagnose areas of need and evaluate restoration progress.

In response to this information gap, the Great Lakes Commission (GLC), through the 2007 National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Category 4 Cooperative Agreement Program (CAP) is creating a web-based Spatial Decision Support System utilizing free and open source software (FOSS) and Open Standards to facilitate comprehensive baseline tracking and analysis of wetlands change over time. Specifically, this system does the following:

• The system identifies and integrates all available wetlands data within the Great Lakes, using national, state, and provincial sources. These data are currently inconsistent in scale, resolution, accuracy, temporality, and classification, which makes baseline comparison amongst different wetlands datasets very difficult. The aggregation and normalization of this information across time and space will better support trend assessments and restoration progress reports.

• The system integrates data from the US Army Corps of Engineer's Great Lakes Habitat Initiative (GLHI) database. The GLHI project includes an inventory of site-specific actions to protect and restore wetlands and aquatic habitat across the Great Lakes region. By leveraging this database, efforts to identify and account for areas of wetlands change (i.e. restoration gains) can be better understood and managed throughout the region.

• The system provides a suite of user-friendly query and analysis tools to help users discover and analyze aggregated wetlands datasets. These tools will facilitate comprehensive, inter-agency tracking, reporting, and analysis within the Great Lakes region.

• The system makes value-added wetlands data available through a variety of file formats and as OGC Web services. This breadth of products and services will maximize the accessibility and extensibility of otherwise unconnected wetlands data.

To communicate to potential users the availability of these tools in support of wetlands tracking and analysis, the GLC is working to actively engage the support of the Wetlands Subcommittee, the Great Lakes Interagency Task Force, and other federal, state, and local entities throughout the region. Additionally, this project utilizes the Great Lakes Information Network (GLIN: http://www.glin.net/wetlands_sdss) for hosting and promoting the SDSS. Since 1993, GLIN has been a trusted and reliable source of information for those who live, work or have an interest in the Great Lakes, and has become a necessary resource for informed, spatially-driven decision-making in the region.