Minnesota’s Lake Superior Coastal Program

Enhancing Coastal Area Technical Assistance with

GIS

Nathan Schroeder
South St. Louis SWCD

January 8th, 2009

Project No. 306-STAR09-08

Contract No. B23140

This project was funded in part under the Coastal Zone Management Act, by NOAA’s
Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management, in cooperation with Minnesota’s
Lake Superior Coastal Program.
Introduction
This project was intended to update our office GIS capabilities in order to better provide
technical assistance to landowners. The software we had was making it difficult to work
with partners, because of incompatibility of software. This upgrade will make it easier to
collect information to assist landowners as well as share that information with other
resource professionals. The result of this upgrade will reduce impacts to coastal waters
by providing landowners with more information to better their landuse decisions, and
also help investigate Wetland Conservation Act violations.

Work Completed
The software was purchased and installed. Due to the time of the year the software has
not yet been used in the field.

Results

The software has not been utilized in the field yet, and that is where we expect it to make
an impact. In the future we plan on using the field software in cooperation with desktop
software to collect more information for landuse decisions and wetland regulation. The
new software will make it much easier and possible to share with anyone who has GIS
capabilities. This new capability will help landowners, cooperating agencies, local
governments, and anyone else who is looking to us for assistance in landuse, stormwater,
water planning, etc. These more informed decisions will help reduce coastal impacts by:
- Making better landuse decisions and reducing sediment laden runoff
- Reduce stormwater impacts from poorly designed facilities
- Creating and implementing a better St. Louis County Water Plan
- Collecting more accurate information regarding wetland regulation

Leveraged Dollars

Only LSCP money and South St. Louis Soil and Water Conservation District funds were
used.

Conclusions

The choosing and purchasing of the software went well. The choices were limited and
we had already worked with one of the options. We would suggest to anyone buying
similar software to make sure that you have someone to help you learn the software or
budget for training. This type of software is not easily used by anyone. We are capable
of using the software, but after reading into the guides more we could enhance our
abilities more by attending training. We may look into this in the future.