November 10, 2026
There are tens of thousands of glacial lakes in the Upper Midwest. Some are barely more than ponds, while others cover more surface area than the country of Hong Kong. The lakes provide critical habitat and ecosystem services, support local economies through fishing and outdoor recreation, and are home to cherished family traditions.
Given their importance, many people and organizations across the region collect lake data – tracking fish populations, non-native species, water quality, land use, and more. The Conservation Planner 2.0, a new tool developed by the Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership, brings many of those datasets together to make it easier to understand trends in lake conditions and respond to challenges, such as warming temperatures and shoreline development. Research funded by the National and Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Centers supported, in part, the data collection and harmonization that underlies the tool.
The Midwest Glacial Lakes Partnership is made up of management agencies, conservation organizations, and individuals who are interested in protecting and conserving inland glacial lakes across the Upper Midwest. Joe Nohner of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources coordinates the partnership. “Our purpose is to work together to address problems that we all share, whether you're in Iowa, Michigan, or the Dakotas,” he said. “We are really excited about the Conservation Planner. It's the first time that all of these data sets have been brought together in one place and served in a way that the public can use it.”
Making Useful Data Usable
The Conservation Planner 2.0 expands and improves upon the original version released in 2019. It offers a new functionality allowing users to drill down to the individual lake level and contains much, much more data. While Nohner emphasized that the tool is not – and could never be – comprehensive of all available lake data, he said “by an order of magnitude or two, we've got way more variables in this version. This tool builds upon regional compilations of data that took a ton of effort to pull together. Each one is the result of years, if not whole careers, of work by individuals across the MGLP.”
The Planner’s fish population models were improved by new data from CASC research led by Gretchen Hansen at the University of Minnesota. The goal of Hansen’s project was to predict fish community responses to climate change in lakes in the region. “We were trying to understand why lakes are variable in their responses,” Hansen explained. “Both to climate itself – the lake temperature responds differently across lakes – and then understanding why fish communities respond differently to the same kind of thermal environments.”
Hansen and her team began by working with U.S. Geological Survey partners to produce temperature models that provide a baseline understanding of the environment the fish are living in and how it is changing with climate change. The outputs of that initial process characterizing the thermal regimes of lakes make up one set of information included in the Conservation Planner. Their next step was to collate all of the fish survey data from agencies around the region – something that turned out to be more complicated than at first glance.
“Bringing together data across state lines has been a long-standing goal and challenge for many people before me. It allows us to make broader inferences about responses to climate change because we get a broader set of conditions – but it was a huge undertaking,” Hansen said. She and her team spent a lot of time building relationships with agency partners and determining the most appropriate data to include – a valuable but time-intensive process. They found that the data were often out of date by the time they were ready to publish anything.
Hansen decided to shift their approach. “At first we were building it like a database – collecting data to build our models. Then we shifted to building a workflow instead, one that is repeatable. It begins with the raw data from states, in all its wonky formats. The data are processed so it can be combined and then we do a bunch of filtering for the outcomes that we are interested in.” Derivatives of those data helped build the Conservation Planner, including predicted changes in fish species abundance under future climate conditions. The full data set and a detailed description of the workflow Hansen’s team developed were recently published in Fisheries.
Improved Planning Capacity at Multiple Scales
Considering just how much information is packed into it, the Conservation Planner is a surprisingly user-friendly tool. That was important to Nohner and the MGLP team. While one primary audience is management professionals – think of a state biologist, Nohner said, someone likely to be data savvy and interested in looking at the broader context – the team also recognized that, ultimately, lake conservation happens at the local level. To meet that need, they designed some aspects of the Planner specifically for a lay audience. The Lake Report function, for example, generates a customized 30-page document on any individual lake. It’s designed to make the information digestible for someone who might live on a lake or serve on a lake board, but doesn't have a professional background in science or resource management.
Both Nohner and Hansen are careful to distinguish the Planner’s broader-scale findings from a more detailed assessment of an individual lake. “There’s always a tension in science,” Hansen explained. “We can do a deep dive on a single lake and learn everything about it. And then we will ask if it applies to any other system, or is it just this lake. Or we can do a big landscape approach and say this works for the average lake, but if you zoom in closely, it might not be accurate for a lot of individual lakes.” When it comes to informing management decisions, she compares the Planner’s information to public health recommendations. “In general, doctors might only recommend mammograms for people over the age of 50. But for a specific patient, after taking personal history and genetics into account, that broad-scale recommendation might not be the right fit anymore.” The Conservation Planner takes the latter approach, without the granular data needed for precise accuracy on every individual lake.
Nohner described the Lake Report as a starting point for conversations and learning more, rather than the final word. “We want people to be activated and thinking about, ‘What does my lake need? How does it compare to the other lakes within my county?’ Getting those wheels turning to help understand your lake’s context and what challenges it faces is really important.”
Supporting Climate Adaptation Action
With 129,000 lakes included in the Conservation Planner, Nohner said, there are nearly endless possibilities for how it might be used to support conservation and adaptation efforts. There is also high variability across the region, so much so that even two lakes right next to each other might have very different challenges and opportunities related to environmental change. To this end, one obvious application is informing decisions in the Resist, Accept, Direct framework – helping management professionals decide which adaptation strategy is most feasible and appropriate for any given lake.
“We are expecting to see the temperatures of our lakes warm, and we are expecting to see challenges with dissolved oxygen. If I’m a lake biologist thinking about lakes at the state level, the Conservation Planner’s fish population projections, paired with direct management knowledge, can help identify which lakes are the best fit for a resist strategy, or where directing might be the more effective choice,” Nohner said. If a particular lake is expected to become uninhabitable for walleye, for instance, it may not make sense to invest resources in resisting that change. In that same lake, however, smallmouth bass and bluegill might be expected to thrive. That information can help shape a fisheries management plan.
Hansen agreed that the Conservation Planner will help direct resources to the strategies that are likely to be the most effective. “One of the best use cases is actually the MGLP itself, as a fish habitat conservation organization that provides funding for on-the-ground strategies across the Resist-Accept-Direct spectrum,” she said. “The Conservation Planner is intended to help both those considering proposing a project and the MGLP themselves when they evaluate, given a limited pool of resources, whether a project objective makes sense for a particular lake.”
The CASCs strive to produce science that is relevant to and actionable for the people making resource management decisions. The Conservation Planner is an exciting example of how to get high quality science into the hands of those who need it most, empowering both management professionals and local communities to make informed planning decisions for the region’s glacial lakes and freshwater fisheries.
Explore The Conservation Planner 2.0.