St. Louis River Estuary Habitat Map
Over the last 18 months, a team from Wisconsin and Minnesota has been working to complete a habitat map of the St. Louis River Estuary, with funding from NOAA’s National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS) Science Collaborative. The project team includes staff from the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve, Wisconsin State Cartographer’s Office, U-Spatial at the University of Minnesota, the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and several independent consultants.
The St. Louis River is the largest U.S. tributary into Lake Superior. The lower 21 miles of the river include a large freshwater estuary.
This project applied mapping techniques to the 57,000 acres of wetlands and adjacent uplands within a mile of the lower 21 miles of the St. Louis River below the Fond du Lac dam. The goal is to support estuary-wide habitat restoration planning and vulnerability assessment. The project responds directly to the needs of the St. Louis River Habitat Workgroup, a coalition of agencies, local government units, communities, and individuals who have been working on implementing their vision since the writing of the 2002 Habitat Plan. The workgroup is updating the 2002 Habitat Plan for the estuary, which is needed to guide future habitat conservation (restoration, enhancement, and protection) of the lower St. Louis River and parts of its watershed in northeastern Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin.
The project transferred knowledge and experience from an earlier habitat mapping project within the boundaries of the Lake Superior Reserve and developed a novel image segmentation approach for land cover classification. The team used image classification methods–including machine learning classifiers and freely available, non-proprietary data–to create a reproducible approach that can be adopted in other locations and redeployed at regular intervals to illuminate change over time. Computational work was done on MSI’s supercomputing cluster, Agate. An additional product from the project is a change analysis report comparing our resulting habitant map to the manually digitized map from 2002 (the date of the latest habitat map of the estuary) to analyze important habitat shifts over the last two decades.
A poster about this research was presented at the 2025 Research Computing Exhibition on April 24, 2025. The poster is on display in the hallways of the MSI offices on the 5th floor of Walter Library.
Image description: Habitat map of the St. Louis River Estuary and surrounding uplands. The estuary runs along the boundary between Wisconsin and Minnesota in the Duluth-Superior metro area.
