Project Overview

Data sources: 

• Great lakes bathymetry (Lake Superior excluded). 2000-2003. Produced by the Canadian Hyrdographic Service and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Geophysical Data Center(NGDC) and the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), Boulder, CO, USA.
• Lake Superior bathymetry. 1998. Produced by the University of Minnesota Duluth, Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI), Duluth, MN, USA.

A key lesson from 50 years of terrestrial conservation science is that maps of valued resources and potential threats are one critical starting point for developing coherent restoration strategies. All management efforts are tied to specific places, and so we need to know the spatial distribution of human impacts in order to guide effective management.   Building on the many previous efforts to map human impacts and priority resources individually, we now have the ability to generate synthetic maps of environmental quality and human impacts for the entire Great Lakes basin. The Great Lakes Environmental Assessment and Mapping Project (GLEAM) aims to develop a high-resolution map of cumulative impacts to the Great Lakes, providing a critical tool for catalyzing and coordinating regional restoration and conservation projects. By specifically accounting for both threats and resources, our impact map will facilitate basin-wide coordination of management efforts by providing all the riparian states and provinces with a unified, quantitative framework for discussion and prioritization. Over a two-year timeline, this undertaking will bring together freshwater scientists, conservationists, and resource managers to develop science-based conservation strategies for these globally-important lakes. Though challenging, this effort is requisite to understanding the current and future state of the Lakes, and will be particularly valuable in the current era of rapid anthropogenic climate change. The final map will provide an unprecedented resource to the entire Great Lakes community, thereby facilitating restoration, conservation, and management actions.

NEW: Download a 2-page summary of the GLEAM project (pdf).   

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