Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center
Habitat Needs Assessment for the Upper Mississippi River System
The Habitat Needs Assessment (HNA) is a multiagency project of the Upper Mississippi River System Environmental Management Program. The HNA will address habitat needs in the two main stem river corridors and four tributaries of the Upper Mississippi River System, totaling 1,158 river miles. We will include in the HNA all aquatic and floodplain terrestrial habitats, including channels, impounded areas, backwaters, and floodplains (bluff to bluff). Data for these areas are available in a readily accessible format and can be used in a geographic information system (GIS), a kind of computerized mapping system.
We will construct an ArcView GIS project to permit bidirectional queries of river habitat areas, land cover, species, and guilds. We will construct models to associate the characteristics of more than 400 species with habitat areas. The ArcView project will be designed to allow user-friendly queries that display guilds and species lists within each guild, display maps of potential habitat areas for selected guilds within selected pools or river reaches, provide species lists for selected river habitat areas, summarize habitat classes by system, pool, or reach levels, and develop metadata.
The ArcView project will be designed to allow species or guilds to be selected with display of potential habitat area maps and reports on the potential habitat areas. The HNA will begin to identify long-term habitat requirements at the system, pool, and reach levels, and will serve to refine the focus of future system monitoring and research activities under the reauthorized Environmental Management Program.
This project was completed in September 2001.
Principal Investigator: Tim Fox
Page Last Modified: April 3, 2018