Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center

The Riverway is at the center of intense economic, political, legal, recreational, and value conflicts because of its proximity to the growing metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Park Service staff need to assemble and use the best available data to make, justify, and enforce resource decisions. This decision support system (DSS) application addresses these National Park Service (NPS) needs in an easy-to-use application that requires no ancillary geographic information system (GIS) software or advanced GIS knowledge to use effectively.

The second phase of this DSS project is the development of a nonspatial database of biological data. This database, built with Microsoft Access, is the storage mechanism for the many biological sampling points that exist in the St. Croix Riverway. The database facilitates data entry, update, and query of biological data records. In addition, it is possible to output a subset of database records (points) in a format viewable by industry-standard GIS software. The second phase of the DSS is currently under way, as we are gathering data on native freshwater mussels, rare plants, and rare animals from a variety of sources (reports, peer-reviewed literature, databases). The data from each of these themes are being placed into a database with more than 100 fields of descriptive data relative to each theme (i.e., water depth, substrate composition, density, plot size, date of most recent observation).