Our Partners

The Great Lakes Watershed Management System was developed with support from our partners. These organizations have provided financial resources and guidance, and have played a major role in increasing the adoptions of the system. If you are interested in becoming in becoming a partner and supporting this effort please contact us.

GLWMS Support

The Great Lakes Watershed Management System represents the integration of several water quality modeling projects across the region, led by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Chicago District (USACE), the Institute of Water Research at Michigan State University (IWR-MSU), and the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University (ABE-Purdue).

TNC funded the development of erosion and sediment models within the Saginaw Bay Watershed, and the ability to re-run those models online for user-defined areas of BMPs or land cover change. TNC also funded the development of watershed-scale prioritization functionality, whereby users could specify a target % of land to focus conservation practices within a particular watershed and then estimate resulting erosion and sediment load reductions.

USACE funded the development of erosion and sediment models for the Fox, Genesee, Maumee, and Saginaw River basins. USACE also funded the development of a web-service version of ABE-Purdue's L-THIA model allowing for an integration of L-THIA estimates of non-point source pollution with estimates of erosion and sediment loading from IWR-MSU's HIT model.

ABE-Purdue developed the web-service version of L-THIA, the expanded list of land cover change and BMP practices available for dynamic simulation, and assembled the necessary backend data to make analysis available for the system's current focus watersheds.

IWR-MSU developed erosion and sediment model for the system's current focus watersheds, the ability to re-run those model on-line under various BMP and land cover change conditions, and the watershed-scale analysis capabilities. IWR-MSU also led the integration of its and ABE-Purdue's analysis tools within this single mapping interface.