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Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership Events 2013 Proposal The Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership is seeking lake-related project proposals for potential funding opportunities in 2013. For more information, see the links below. For questions about a specific project or the process to submit a proposal, please contact Katie Haws at 218-833-8618 or katie.haws@state.mn.us 2013 Project Proposal Form If you build it, they will swim This spring noted the first time in many years fish in the Pigeon River could access the waters of Pigeon Lake (Itasca County, MN). A partnership between the Chippewa National Forest, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources removed a fish barrier on this system. To read more, click here . Coming October, 2011 The Midwest Glacial Lakes partnership will release fish habitat assessments in October. Click here to read more. A Year in Review: 2010 MGLP Review is Here! 2010 was a great year for lakes conservation activities in the Midwest. Partners of the Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership prepared a document, "2010 MGLP Review", highlighting a sample of these accomplishments. Several partners used similar strategies to achieve conservation success, while others found unique ways to work toward sustainable lake habitats. Please read this document to see what exciting things are happening for lakes. You can also see individual state pages by following the links below: Illinois Indiana Iowa Michigan Minnesota North Dakota South Dakota Wisconsin National Fish Habitat Action Plan project dollars for MGLP! The National Fish Habitat Board recommended more than $90,000 in project funds for the Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership for 2011. This is the second year the partnership has received or is recommended to receive funding for projects. In anticipation of project dollars, MGLP partners submitted ten proposals this past September, requesting a total of $750,000 and matching that amount with more than $1 million in partner funds. A review team has ranked the proposals and the final selection of what projects to fund will be made by the Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership Steering Committee. Funding for NFHAP projects is provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who also may provide guidance on project selection. The projects received for funding consideration include:
In future years, the Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership will likely use a "Call for Proposals" process to generate projects for funding consideration. If you would like to discuss a possible project idea or NFHAP projects in general, please contact Pat Rivers at 218-327-4306. MGLP Partners Work to Create Midwest Lakeshed Layer Watershed management: how can you do it without a detailed understanding of how impacts on land affect the receiving lakes and rivers? For the Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership, one of our most important tasks over the past two years has been acquiring the necessary data to quantify land use affecting lakes. Specifically, most of the geographical extent of the partnership lacked a GIS lakeshed (i.e., local catchment or watershed for a given lake) layer at a scale that would be useful for individual lakes assessment and management. Michigan was the exception having completed lakeshed delineations for lakes larger than 5 acres. Minnesota had detailed information for lakes larger than 10 acres, but not the smaller lakes. Iowa had information only for its priority lakes. Other states lacked the data completely. To obtain the data needed to create a unified lakeshed layer, we have used several sources of funding and labor. The list includes resources from NFHAP, individual states, Missouri Resource Assessment Partnership, Purdue University, and a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant. As we near completion for each state, the next step is to create one layer from the eight individual state layers, massaging lakesheds that cross state borders into meaningful boundaries. Once this task is completed, the MGLP lakeshed layer will be the basis for a lakes' assessment conducted by the consulting firm Downstream Strategies. This team will quantify land use and stressors for each lake's local lakeshed and also for tributary lakesheds (i.e., tributary catchments that flow into a given lake). This effort really is the first of its kind in bringing detailed lakeshed information across multiple states into a common layer. The work is paving the way for a national lakes assessment, acting as a pilot with lessons learned and best ways to address a number of data questions. Lakeshed information will also be useful on a local level; the state of South Dakota will use the data to update its Wildlife Action Plan's aquatics component. A broad distribution of the data layer is also planned. |
