Prioritized Monitoring for the Lake Superior Basin

Abstract

This project quantifies the gradient of environmental stressors within the Lake Superior basin at a fine spatial resolution, and uses this gradient to develop a monitoring framework that will support individual agency and ongoing binational cooperative monitoring efforts across the basin. Key elements of the project include development of high-resolution watersheds on U.S. and Canadian sides of the basin, summarization of the major point and non-point stressors within the watersheds, and creation of tools for scaling the watersheds and stressor summaries to accommodate the appropriate spatial scales for major environmental indicators. These data and tools allow identification of reference and ‘at-risk’ sites, and promote development of statistically defensible monitoring designs that will work within and across agency monitoring efforts.