Breakout Presentation Schedule

The 2007 RDX Conference features and exciting schedule of breakout presentations, slotted into two sets of three concurrnet tracks. Information about these sessions and the presentations is below.

Morning Breakout (10 am - Noon)

Ecological Monitoring and Reporting I
Online Geospatial Communities
Observing Systems

Afternoon Breakout (1 - 3 pm)

Ecological Monitoring and Reporting II
Land Use Transformations
The Future of the Great Lakes Information Network

Ecological Monitoring and Reporting I

10:00 - 10:30 AM
Ecological Monitoring and Reporting: Integrated NOAA Information and Indicators to Support Decision Making for the Great Lakes Region

Gunnar Lauenstein, Mary Baker, George Sharman, Dave Schwab, Todd Goeks
NOAA, National Ocean Service - Office of Response and Restoration
Seattle, Washington

NOAA has diverse activities in the Great Lakes region related to ecological monitoring and reporting. As part of an effort to improve development and delivery of NOAA products and services in the Great Lakes region, NOAA components working in the Great Lakes are integrating our efforts to provide information and indicators to support sound decision making. This talk will summarize ongoing efforts and recent findings, and present ideas for improving them in support of the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration. NOAA’s ongoing efforts to collect and disseminate ecological information include CoastWatch (delivering near-real-time data and products), the National Status and Trends Program monitoring of sediment and mussels, the National Geophysical Data Center’s creation of digital elevation models for the Great Lakes, the National Climatic Data Center's (NCDC) observations and meteorological records and histories for the Great Lakes, National Oceanic Data Center's (NODC) development of analysis support for hypoxia events, and databases and data conversion tools to support response and restoration decisions at Superfund Sites in the Great Lakes through a partnership with the EPA Great Lakes Program Office.

Recent findings and current status of these efforts include the finding of elevated concentrations of the pesticide and flame retardant mirex in zebra mussels, especially in Lake Ontario, though it appears to have declined since 1992. The Status and Trends Program has recently added the analysis of PBDE flame retardant chemicals to their suite. Initial ideas for improving and integrating these efforts include partnering with Canadian counterparts to expand monitoring efforts to all shores of the Great Lakes. Digital elevation models are complete for five of the six Great Lakes (Lake Superior will be completed soon) and these models are widely used decision-support tools. Indicators of ecosystem health are being developed and applied throughout NOAA programs and we will continue to work with other partners in the region to improve their effectiveness and use.

10:30 - 11:00 AM
Toxic Pollutants in the Great Lakes Atmosphere: An Update on Programs to Track the Emissions and Concentrations of PBTs.

Jon Dettling
Great Lakes Commission
Ann Arbor, Michigan

The Laurentian Great Lakes are uniquely susceptible to the accumulation of persistant toxic substances and it has been well-established that the atmospheric input of these substances is the most important route of entry for most substances for most of the five lakes. Following legislation and agreements in the late 1980s, the past two decades have seen much work at addressing this issue. However, much work remains to better understand the input of toxic substances to the lakes from the atmosphere, the sources of these substances and the actions that might be taken to alleviate toxic impacts to humans or wildlife living in or near the lakes.

This presentation will give an overview of a long-standing collaborative effort to identify toxic emissions to the regions air and compile a comprehensive and comparable regional inventory of such emissions. Emphasis will be placed on the role of integrating datasets on a regional level and in sharing protocols and data management infrastructure. The presentation will also discuss a recent assessment of regional programs for monitoring mercury in the atmospehre or deposition. The assessment points out a need and makes some recommendations for collaboration at a regional level to produce comprehensive sets of data and information for use in decision-making.

11:00 - 11:30 AM
Developing an Information Infrastructure for North American Sturgeon: Implications for the Great Lakes

Tracy L. Kolb1*, William W. Taylor1, Andrea Ostroff2, Andrew Loftus3
1Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Michigan State University-East Lansing, Michigan
2 NBII – National Program Office, USGS – Reston, Virginia
3Loftus Consulting – Annapolis, Maryland

During the last two decades, concerns about the wide scale decline of fisheries resources have transitioned from a primarily academic concern to a mainstream policy issue. At the core of the issue is the need to maintain and publish knowledge about species, their distributions, and indices of abundance. This type of endeavor entails a need for sharing information across political and research boundaries, however difficulties arise because of the lack of data availability and standardization. In order to address this problem, we are developing a template for a nationwide status and trends information system for North American fisheries and aquatic resources, using lake sturgeon as a pilot species. Great Lakes sturgeon information has provided a particularly substantial foundation for this system due to the long-term interest in sturgeon populations and the resulting data available in the region. Project objectives include: 1) identifying available sturgeon information, 2) identifying obstacles to information sharing, 3) recommending options for overcoming political and/or technical barriers to data sharing, and 4) building a prototype information system that displays sturgeon status, trends, and availability of biological information at multiple spatial scales. Methods include surveying the federal, state, tribal, private, and university sturgeon researchers to collect detailed information on sturgeon data. Specifically we are collecting information on the type, quality, amount, availability of the data, as well associated data sharing concerns. The prototype system will be supported by a relational database model built with a spatial component. Partners include: the Great Lakes GIS project, the Lake Huron Technical Committee, the Michigan State Computer Science and Engineering Department and the Michigan State Department of Geography.

11:30 - Noon
Assembling and Analyzing Information under Ontario's Clean Water Act

Ian Parrish
Ontario Ministry of Environment
Etobicoke, Ontario

In the Province of Ontario, is committed to developing a locally-led, place-based, science-based, risk assessment process to protect sources of municipal drinking water is required under the Clean Water Act (2006).

Legislatively, The Act is pioneering some approaches that both the environmental management and information management communities should take interest. Specifically, digital images have been imbedded in regulation as an actual definition of Source Protection Planning Areas under the Act. The Act specifies that mandatory information required for the development of risk assessment must be provided by conservation authorities, municipalities and the Crown (province). There are requirements for geospatial enablement and integration of information from multiple agencies and jurisdictions to support analyses of the landscape to assess vulnerabilities and threats on the landscape, so the collection, so land-use and activities are foci in the threat evaluations. Lastly, the Act contains specific sections that give our Minister authorities on setting Great Lakes targets and processes.

Online Geospatial Communities

10:00 - 10:30 AM
Land Information Ontario

Mike Robertson
Land Information Ontario, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources
Peterborough, Ontario

Land Information Ontario has been actively acquiring high resolution satellite imagery and digital orthophotography, through the development of public and private sector funding partnerships across Ontario. The demand for remote sensing and high resolution imagery has increased dramatically over the past few years and is now thought of as an important, if not critical, data set to have within a GIS environment. Orthophotography technology has now moved to digital acquisition platforms, which has reduced the cost of acquisition and processing of those products. Approximately 11 million dollars has been invested in Ontario over the past five years for those products, with the costs being shared between almost 200 funding partners. Through these partnerships, over 150,000 sq km of imagery has been acquired. This has been a unique demonstration of public and private sector organizations working together to acquire data that is critical to a wide variety of business needs. This paper focuses on the role of Land Information Ontario in coordinating and developing provincial, municipal, federal and private sector relationships to ensure that all organizations are able to acquire imagery through a shared funding model. The discussion will also include where imagery has been acquired as well as what is being planned for the future. There are also many challenges related to the development of these broad partnerships, which will be highlighted, so that others can learn from what Land Information Ontario has experienced.

10:30 - 11:00 AM
MichiganView Consortium: Promoting Remote Sensing in the Great Lakes Region

Tyler Erickson
Michigan Tech Research Institute
Ann Arbor, Michigan

MichiganView is a state associate member of the AmericaView(AV) program, a U.S. nationwide program that focuses on satellite remote sensing data and technologies in support of applied research, K-16 education, workforce development, and technology transfer. AmericaView is administered through a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey and the AmericaView Consortium. The AmericaView Consortium is comprised of university-led, state-based consortia working together to build a nationwide network of state and local users. AmericaView supports the goals of the AV Program by further expanding communications networks, facilities, and capabilities for acquiring and sharing remotely sensed data among AmericaView state members. The Consortium is actively working with the USGS and universities across the country to expand participation in the AV Program to all 50 states. MichiganView was granted associate member status in the AmericaView program in February,
2007, and is currently in the process of building a statewide consortium and planning activities to promote the use of remote sensing data and technologies in Michigan and the surrounding Great Lakes. This talk will provide an overview of the program and opportunities for suggestions.

11:00 - 11:30 AM
The Great Lakes Urban Survey: Progress Toward a Consistent Bi-National Portrayal of Urban Form of Major Great Lakes Cities

B. Guindon1, Y. Zhang1 and J. G Lyon2
1Canada Centre for Remote Sensing - Ottawa, Ontario
2Environmental Sciences Division, United States Environmental Protection Agency - Las Vegas, Nevada

Rapid urbanization in the Great Lakes region can be expected to continue to be a matter of important economic and environmental concern. It is generally recognized that there is a need for regionally ‘seamless’ and consistent information to support the development of effective bi-national policies to ensure the sustainability of future growth. At the 2006 RDX meeting in Rochester we proposed the creation of such a geospatial database of urban form for the major cities in the lower basin. This paper describes progress toward that goal, the Great Lakes Urban Survey (GLUS). Urban form has been derived from Landsat-based landcover/landuse mapping (imagery of the period 1999-2001) and spatially integrated with demographics and transportation statistics from the 2001 Canadian census, the 2000 US census and US Department of Transportation on-line databases. Urban form influences the intensity and spatial patterns of many urban processes that result in energy consumption and impact urban environmental quality. The presentation will conclude with some initial results from analyses of GLUS addressing the development of landscape metrics to quantify urban sprawl.

11:30 - Noon
Harmonizing Access to Canadian/USA Spatial Data via the North American Profile

Raphael Sussman
Land Information Ontario
Peterborough, Ontario

In recent years it has become clearly evident that the need to harmonize CAN/USA spatial data has taken on a sense of urgency. This is particularly true in the border areas between Canada and the USA and in the Great Lakes; Mexico is also involved in this effort. One approach to this challenge, with spatial data between the two countries, is to harmonize the spatial metadata that characterize spatial data that both countries use. Spatial metadata is information about an individual spatial dataset, data accuracy, content, data quality, as well as a host of items on dataset origin, management, and distribution, etc. Hence, spatial metadata facilitates the Discovery, Evaluation, Extraction and Employment and Use of spatial databases regardless of source in North America. The NAP-Metadata (NAP-Meta) is a universal standard for metadata specification in both Canada and the USA. It has been jointly developed by spatial data experts from both countries, with discussion with Mexico. As such the NAP-M is a Profile, or subset of the world spatial metadata standard ISO 19115 completed in 2003. The original world standard was developed by ISO/TC211 Committee on Geographic Information/Geomatics, which includes peer delegations from many countries, including Canada, the USA, and Mexico. This paper explores the development and content of NAP-M, and its current situation in the formal standards approval process. It will also explore some of the potential applications of the NAP-M to current databases in Canada and the USA. It will also include an effort to ascertain, define, and codify a set of "Best Practices” for the Profile to ensure a uniform and wide applicability of use.

Observing Systems

10:00 - 10:30 AM
Data Management and Communications (DMAC) under the Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS)

Roger Gauther
Great Lakes Observing System
Ann Arbor, Michigan

10:30 - 11:00 AM
Radar and Water Resource Applications Development at CCRS

Brian Brisco
Canada Centre for Remote Sensing
Ottawa, Ontario

Fresh water is arguably the most vital resource for all aspects of a healthy and stable, environment and society. Monitoring the extent of surface water enables resource managers to detect perturbations and long term trends in water availability, and set consumption guidelines accordingly. Radar in general and RADARSAT in particular is very good at detecting open surface water and has been used operationally for flood monitoring in many countries. Significant radar data archives now exist to analyse seasonal, annual and decadal trends, to attain a better understanding of the Canadian freshwater cycle. Five pilot sites have been selected to demonstrate this application including: Fort Mackay, AB, a tar sands area with water used for industrial purposes; St. Denis, SK, a wildlife reserve in an agricultural area with numerous ponds and lakes; Ivvavik National Park, YT, the surface and river icings here are critical for the ecological balance; Tuktut Nogait National Park, YT, the many park lakes are currently poorly monitored and understood; and Old Crow Flats, YT, a large area of ponds and lakes thought to be at risk from permafrost degradation. This paper will demonstrate preliminary results of monitoring seasonal and annual changes in surface water distribution, using RADARSAT imagery and these pilot test sites. An overview of the successes and limitations of the approach will be given, including end-user evaluations, as well as a summary of the current state of evolution of the method and the envisioned software development plan for this application.

11:00 - 11:30 AM
Real-time Coastal Observation Network (ReCON)

Steve Ruberg
NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory
Ann Arbor, Michigan

RECON, a coastal observation network with nodes on Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Erie, has been designed to allow flexible deployment of coastal access points and simplified integration of sensor packages. The system provides continuous observations of chemical, biological, and physical parameters, facilitates modification of sampling parameters in anticipation of episodic events, facilitates collection of field samples in response to episodic events, supports long term research and contributes to sensor and system development. The system currently supports projects addressing harmful algal bloom (HAB) detection, human health observations related to beach closures and drinking water processing concerns, rip current warnings, integrated ecosystem assessment, and public access to historic shipwrecks at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. RECON system development relies on wireless broadband technology and a network-based underwater hub designed to allow expansion via satellite nodes. The system architecture allows simplified integration of sensors from various institutions through guest ports. Access to and control of instrumentation is made available to the scientific community and educational institutions through the internet. A real-time database management system provides data and information for forecast model initial conditions, forecast verification, public information, and educational outreach.

11:30 - Noon
Optimizing Ontario’s Water Base Data to Support Effective Water Management in Ontario

Frank Kenny
Water Resources Information Program
Ontario Ministry of Environment

In 2000, the Ontario government initiated the Water Resources Information Project (WRIP). This project (and since 2005 transferred to program status) was designed to provide information management to help support effective immediate water management and longer term to develop and implement water information strategies to ensure that the data, tools and information systems are available to Ontario's water resource managers across government ministries and partner agencies. Key among the partner agencies that we actively work with are Ontario’s 36 watershed-based Conservation Authorities (CAs) and federal government departments.
This presentation will focus on several large-scale fundamental “base data” and derivative datasets that have been (or will be) developed and how these data and associated tools are operationally being used and shared by water resource managers at all levels of government (municipal, provincial, conservation authorities and federal). Data classes presented will include those where we take a primary (custodial) role (DEMs, streams, hydrology networks, watersheds, monitoring stations, etc.) and additional data classes where we work closely with data custodians to ensure their data products are standarized, integratable, documented and in sharable GIS formats (e.g. meteorological data, hydraulic data, geological mapping, ortho-imagery, water wells, geological boreholes, agricultural drains, wellhead protection zones etc.).

Ecological Monitoring and Reporting II

1:00 - 1:30 PM
Quantifying Cumulative Anthropogenic Stress within Great Lakes Watersheds

T. P. Hollenhorst *, G. E. Host, L.B. Johnson
Natural Resources Research Institute, University of Minnesota
Duluth, Minnesota

Watersheds are widely recognized as essential summary units for ecosystem research and management, particularly in aquatic systems. Archydro is a data model developed by ESRI, designed to manage and process watershed delineations and watershed summary information. Using flow direction and flow accumulation grids derived from elevation maps, stream networks are identified based on a minimum flow accumulation threshold. This allows for selectively delineating streams at either broad scales or very fine scales. Once the stream networks are delineated, flow direction is used to delineate the contributing area or sub-catchment for each stream reach between stream confluences. Each sub-catchment is given a unique "hydro-id" and the next down hydro-id is identified for the next catchment a particular catchment flows into.

These attributes are also transferred to the corresponding stream reach and pour points. Because the archydro data model contains the "nextdown" id, it is possible, to accumulate information as the streams are followed down the drainage network. Area weighted means of relative values associated with each catchment (i.e. proportion or density) can also be accumulated down the network. We applied the archydro data model to several Great Lakes watersheds to quantify cummulative anthropogenic stress within each watershed. Land cover, human population density, road density and point sources of stress were all summarized for each subcatchment and accumulated down the network. Standard normal transformations were applied to each sub-catchment's stressor value and the results were summed for each catchment, resulting in a single integrated stressor score "sum-rel" for each catchment. Area weighted means of this integrated sum-rel scores was also accumlated down the drainage network within each watershed.

1:30 - 2:00 PM
Great Lakes Habitat Restoration

Roger Gauthier
Great Lakes Commission
Ann Arbor, Michigan

2:00 - 2:30 PM
Ambient Water Quality Monitoring on lower Green Bay and the Fox River

Tracy Valenta
Green Bay Metropolitan Sewerage District
Green Bay, Wisconsin

The Green Bay Metropolitan Sewerage District (GBMSD) has been conducting voluntary water quality monitoring on the waters of the lower Green Bay and the Fox River since 1986. The area of coverage extends from the De Pere Dam to 14 miles into Green Bay. The primary purpose of the program is to provide high quality data to GBMSD in order to determine the effect of our discharge on the Fox River and Green Bay. In addition, GBMSD is providing a valuable service to regional regulatory and research agencies that are also interested in the use of the data gathered by the program.

Typically 12-16 water quality surveys are conducted in a given year. Surveys consist of whole water column profile measurements, depth of solar radiation penetration and the collection of water for laboratory analysis for each of the 18 sites. Samples are analyzed for chloride, chlorophyll a, total suspended solids, volatile suspended solids, total solids, volatile solids, turbidity and nutrients. In addition to routine water surveys, GBMSD also samples for the presence of organic and inorganic pollutants in both the Bay and Fox River. Both sediment and ambient water are analyzed for PCBs, pesticides and heavy metals such as mercury.

The data that is generated by the program is interpreted and analyzed annually and compiled into an access database. The District, for several years, has been working closely with University of Green Bay on long term trend analysis of data on the Fox River and Green Bay. Furthermore, in conjunction with other researchers it has been possible to correlate our water quality data with other noted biological changes in the bay, such as the effect of zebra mussel on water quality.

2:30 - 3:00 PM
Archiving research data with EML and CDX: biologists meet metadata

Terry N. Brown
Natural Resources Research Institute
University of Minnesota

The Great Lakes Environmental Indicators project (GLEI) serves as a case study in the long term archiving and dissemination of research data in a usable form. The USEPA spends millions of dollars on the production of singleton research data sets through Science to Achieve Results (STAR) and other programs. A Research Data eXchange Protocol (RDXP) was developed with the goal of preserving these data sets in a form which would (a) persist for at least twenty years, and (b) not rely on of the availability of the original researcher. The EPA's Exchange Network (CDX) provides a highly structured mechanism for managing regulatory data, but CDX does not currently handle research data sets with singleton, ad hoc structure. RDXP uses the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) to wrap these data sets in a form suitable for management and archiving with CDX. Using GLEI and the $30M Estuarine and Great Lakes (EaGLe) STAR program as a case study, this paper outlines the structure of the system, and looks at some of the challenges involved when biologists are asked to provide highly structured metadata.

Land Use Transformations

1:00 - 1:30 PM
Land Use Monitoring in the St. Lawrence River Valley Current State and Recent Evolution

Guy Létourneau
Remote Sensing Project Leader, Water Quality Monitoring and Surveillance, Environment Canada
Montréal, Quebec
The purpose of this project is to do a periodic review of land use along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River and to identify the changes that have taken place along their shores. The main project objective is to implement a follow-up remote sensing activity for this component to contribute to the State of the St. Lawrence Monitoring Program. To do so, one or more shore condition indicators will have to be developed on the basis of the existing maps as well as a method for identifying significant changes in land use since the 1970s by means of the Canadian archives of Landsat images (MSS, TM and ETM) and existing land use maps. Mapping is currently under way using 1970s Landsat-MSS images and should produce ten general land use classes. That mapping will be used as the baseline year for this project. Among the existing datasets are 1993-1994 and 1999-2003 mappings of the valley of the St. Lawrence, and 1990 and 2000 mappings by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. An analysis of the accuracy of the classes in each of these mappings is also underway so that we can assess the relative weight of each of the classes in any analysis of the changes.

1:30 - 2:00 PM
Use of Landsat Imagery for Evaluating Land Cover / Land Use Changes for a 30 - Year Period for the Lake Erie Watershed

Mark Seidelmann
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio

Current and historical land cover / land use information is an important contribution to many urban and watershed planning activities. This information is invaluable for those investigating the relationship between changes in human activity and changes in water quality. Understanding past activities will assist in the planning of future land development. The main objective of this study was to use medium resolution (Landsat) satellite imagery to produce an accurate historical land use / land cover map along the Lake Erie coastline, focusing on areas located in the rural / urban fringe. This is traditionally a difficult task due to the heterogeneous nature of developed areas. A test area was chosen in the Cleveland, Ohio area because this was a good representation of the rural / urban fringe. The satellite imagery was geometrically and radiometrically corrected to minimize errors created by seasonal and atmospheric variations between images. When initial attempts using traditional pixel-based classification techniques failed to create satisfactory land use / land cover results, an object ? based mapping technique was used. To further improve the quality of the resulting land cover maps, an extra layer ? NDVI difference layers of a leaf on and leaf off image ? was used in the classification process. Also, standard deviations of Landsat image bands within image objects were added to increase separation between land cover classes. The final land cover / land use classification map was produced with an 89.8% overall accuracy.

2:00 - 2:30 PM
Coastal Change Analysis: Completion of a National Baseline

Herold, Nate
NOAA Coastal Services Center

The NOAA Coastal Services Center (CSC) has recently completed a nationally baseline of land cover and change information, for the coastal zone of the U.S., as part of its Coastal-Change Analysis Program (C-CAP). C-CAP products inventory coastal intertidal areas, wetlands, and adjacent uplands with the goal of monitoring changes in these habitats, on a one-to-five year repeat cycle. These maps are developed utilizing remotely sensed imagery, and can be used to track changes in the landscape through time. The C-CAP effort is conducted in coordination with state coastal management agencies, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and other federal programs in support of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) effort. This presentation will review C-CAP's national baseline; current initiatives and past trends in the Great Lakes region; as well as C-CAP's vision for future higher-resolution land cover mapping.

2:30 - 3:00 PM
Great Lakes Basin Land-Cover Data: Issues and Opportunities

Iiames, John
US EPA

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is developing a consistent land-cover (LC) data set for the entire 480,000 km2 Great Lakes Basin (GLB). The acquisition of consistent LC data has proven difficult both within the US and across GLB political boundaries due to disparate mapping efforts to date (i.e., regional, national, and global) as well as multi-year data gaps. To address these issues, the EPA will use NASA?s 16-day composite normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) 250-m data product (MOD13) developed using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The NDVI data will be preprocessed to eliminate low quality data and missing data will be estimated using a Fourier transformation to provide high quality temporal profile data. Temporal profiles will be processed for 19 separate ecoregions across the GLB (US= 12 and Canada=7) using a phenology-based analytical approach. This paper examines multiple LC products including the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Global 1-km IGBP, the National Land Cover Dataset 2001 (NLCD 2001), the Coastal Change Analysis Program 2000 (CCAP 2000), and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources LC data set. An initial issue was the development of an appropriate agriculture mask for the GLB. Within one Omernik ecoregion in southern Michigan and Northern Indiana, 25 counties were analyzed for agricultural area only (includes orchards) using both the NLCD 2001 and the CCAP 2000 data compared to an assumed ground validation dataset provided by the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) 5-year census. A county-by-county assessment indicated a consistent overestimation bias of agriculture by both the NLCD 2001 and CCAP 2000 products. The NLCD 2001 product had the best correlation compared to the USDA county level statistics data. The percentage of agricultural land across all 25 counties yielded the following: USDA NASS (24.7%), NLCD 2001 (31.7%), and CCAP 2000 (44.2%).

Note: Although this work was reviewed by EPA and approved for publication, it may not necessarily reflect official Agency policy.

The Future of the Great Lakes Information Network

1:00 - 1:45 pm
Future of GLIN (60 min)
Christine Manninen
Great Lakes Commission

The Great Lakes Information Network (GLIN: www.glin.net) has served as the region's primary portal for Great Lakes news and information since 1993. Created and managed by the Great Lakes Commission, GLIN has built a broad constituency of users and continues to evolve to meet the needs of new audiences. Policymakers and stakeholders regularly turn to GLIN for the latest information about the environmental and economic challenges facing the Great Lakes. Enhanced e-communication and mapping tools are engaging new users daily and educating future generations about protecting and restoring the lakes.

1:00 - 2:30 PM
GLIN GIS Demo (60 min)
Pete Giencke
Great Lakes Commission

The Great Lakes Information Network (GLIN) GIS Clearinghouse is an open source-based suite of tools designed to facilitate the publication and dissemination of Great Lakes-themed vector and raster datasets. Through the GLIN GIS, registered users and organizations can publish and have hosted their Great Lakes-related geospatial data, free of charge. Hosted data automatically gets converted into both OGC Web services (i.e. WFS, WMS) and a variety of file formats (e.g. GML, KML, SHP). Metadata for each layer is checked for FGDC-compliance and subsequently published to Geospatial Onestop (GOS) for greater discovery and distribution. The GLIN GIS also provides tools for web mapping, a map gallery, and links to additional Great Lakes data resources.

2:30 - 3:00

GLIN Design Discussion

The Great Lakes Information Network (GLIN: www.glin.net) is being redesigned to better serve the needs of its users. Join GLIN staff for open discussion about the information needs of the region. What tools and resources can we make available on GLIN that would better inform Great Lakes management decisions? Participants will get a preview of the new GLIN and related applications.