This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.
The Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Restoration Assessment (https://glcwra.wim.usgs.gov/) is an online geospatial decision support system designed to identify, assess, and prioritize areas along the U.S. coast of the Great Lakes that have the greatest potential for coastal wetland habitat restoration. In 2012, a collaborative group from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), University of Michigan, Nature Conservancy, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and other agencies initiated a geospatial analysis of western Lake Erie that characterized the restorability of the coastal area from the Detroit River (Michigan) to the Black River (Ohio). Funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and USGS supported expansion of the analysis to cover five other wetland-rich sections of the U.S. Great Lakes coasts: the Connecting River System around Lake St. Clair, Saginaw Bay (Lake Huron), Upper Lake Michigan, Green Bay (Lake Michigan), and Lake Ontario. Data from individual restoration assessments completed for each geography are available through a geonarrative and linked mappers. This analysis revealed extensive areas of potentially restorable coastal wetlands in western Lake Erie, Green Bay, and Saginaw Bay, with pockets of potentially restorable areas in the other geographies. Although a comparable analysis for the Canadian coastal area is not available yet, these products can be used in conjunction with the Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Decision Support Tool to support landscape-scale coastal wetland restoration.
