Category:

Website of the week: Great Lakes Monitoring is rich in data

December 3rd, 2014 by

A closer look at web tools and sites that boost research and empower Great Lakes communities to secure a healthy environment and economy. 

Monitoring data that used to take months to find and retrieve now takes just minutes with Great Lakes Monitoring. The new web application makes it easy to view and analyze decades of high-quality nutrient, contaminant, and water characteristic data collected by universities and government agencies across the region, including the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office. 

 Interactive maps and menus provide an overview of monitoring locations and allow users to drill down to detailed data profiles for each site and compare specific parameters across multiple sites. From the Explore Trends view, users can see basin-wide patterns for environmental characteristics like phosphorus, chlorophyll a, nitrogen, and mercury. 

The cutting-edge tool also allows researchers to create and download their own data sets for the locations, sources, environmental characteristics, and dates that most interest them. And a variety of available file types make offline use easy.
 
In addition to improving data access, Great Lakes Monitoring makes it easier for researchers, universities, and agencies to share data with the public.
 
Great Lakes Monitoring was created by IISG and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in collaboration with Barbara Minsker and her lab at the University of Illinois Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Funding for the project comes from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.  
 
Skip to content