| “We were proactive, and we had something useful when the need came.” | |
| Catherine Ballard, Michigan Coastal Management Program | |
When Michigan’s governor created a task force to look at the potential opportunities and impacts of offshore wind energy, the state’s coastal resource managers were ready with a geographic information system (GIS)-based decision-support tool for offshore resources. The maps that the tool generated were key to the task force’s deliberations and decision-making.
“We were proactive, and we had something useful when the need came,” says Catherine Ballard, soon-to-be-retiring chief of Michigan’s Coastal Management Program. “It was nice to be out in front on this issue.”
Michigan’s coastal program sponsored the development of the Lakebed Alteration Assessment Tool to aid in the permitting of activities that could result in lakebed impacts, such as offshore wind farms and dredging projects, Ballard says.
“Our goal was to produce a user-friendly mapping tool that assembles relevant political, cultural, environmental, biological, and physical data,” says Matt Warner, environmental quality analyst with Michigan’s Coastal Management Program.
The decision-support tool grew out of a study supported by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission looking at “what the future of the lakebed might be,” Ballard says. “At the time we didn’t have any good way to assess alterations to the lakebed.”
In 2008, the coastal program gave funding to the University of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Institute for Fisheries Research to create a tool to identify bottomland areas that support fish production.
“That built the foundation for the Lakebed Alteration Assessment Tool,” Warner explains. “It’s an ArcGIS-system with added functionality that simplifies the process for the user.”
“To me,” Ballard says, “that’s the beauty of it. You don’t need to be a GIS expert to use it.”
“One of the nice benefits,” Warner adds, “is that this is going to feed into our marine spatial planning efforts. It’s a very robust Great Lakes information system.”
While the tool was developed to support coastal management permitting decisions, its beta testing coincided with the governor’s creation of the Great Lakes Offshore Wind (GLOW) Council.
“It was a great symbiotic relationship,” Ballard says. “GLOW used our tool to identify potential wind energy sites, and they gave us feedback that helped us improve the tool even more.”
Warner notes that the tool could easily transfer to other coastal states. “We’re using out-of-the-box software, and this is a pretty basic type of spatial analysis.”
The tool is currently only available by CD-ROM, but there are plans to move it to the Internet. Work is also underway to incorporate a weighting mechanism for each attribute that would enable the ranking of various sites for development.
“I’m very proud of it,” Ballard says. “I think we haven’t even tapped all its different applications. It creates a great basis for us to move forward.”
For more information on the Lakebed Alteration Assessment Tool, contact Matt Warner at (517) 241-1442, or WARNERM1@michigan.gov.
