Welcome to the Great Lakes lake sturgeon tributary database and Geographic Information System. This interactive GIS application and metadatabase have been designed to compile the available lake sturgeon data sources to help focus restoration and research activities on priority lake sturgeon waters.

The web application functions much like a GIS database, allowing selection of various data layers and enabling the user to query available data to find specific information of interest.

All known lake sturgeon waters within the Great Lakes Basin (extirpated, historic, reintroduced, and current) are included. Where available, information is referenced for presence of adults, juveniles, and subadults, and whether spawning has been observed, egg deposition documented, and larvae surveyed for. Data fields reporting whether contaminant, genetic or age samples were collected, year(s) data collected, investigator(s) involved, and citations for available reports and publications and point of contact for additional information are included.

Provisional Data: Data in the database are subject to change as new information is recorded and reported to the database administrator. Lake sturgeon researchers and managers are welcome to contact the database administrator to correct records at any time! Simply click the contact us button and email your request.

Definitions:

Presumed Endemic: waters known to have supported lake sturgeon in the past without stocking - for some waters included in this project this information has not been identified yet, or is subject to change based on reliability of source.

Adult: 15 years of age and older
Sub-Adult: 5-15 years of age
Juvenile: 0-5 years of age

Basic BioInformation: age, gender, length, weight, etc.
Other Scientific Information: environmental conditions, habitat characteristics, other species present, etc

 

Geographic Search Help

Visible/Active: When you enter the IMS mapping server site you will see two columns of buttons on the side by the layer names. The two columns of buttons are toggles for visible and active. VISIBLE means that the layer you have selected will be shown on the map after you click the Refresh Map button. You can click as many visibile layers as you wish, then click the Refresh button to get a new map. WARNING, if overlapping layers are made visible, only the layer highest on the list will be actually show on the map. For instance, for a river with both spawning observed and telemetry studies, you will not see the symbol on the map for telemetry studies if both layers are made visible, because the spawning observed layer is higher on the list and also applicable to that river. ACTIVE means that the layer is activated or searchable for the tools which search the table of data associated with the layer. Note, only one layer may be active at a time. When using the find , query , or identify tools, they will only act on the active layer.

Layers: Layer "Presumed Endemic" is a file of geographically linked data with a visual distinction between presumed endemic rivers and not. "Eggs - rivers" and "Eggs - lakes" are a pair of layers which together display the records which indicated presence of lake sturgeon eggs. Because rivers are line data sources and lakes are polygon data sources they have not been combined into single layers.

Legend: In the upper left of the toolbar is a button which toggles the legend to display the colors and symbols and more explanatory names for the layers.

Fast Pick: When viewing the results of a query within the ArcIMS viewer, click on the number in the left-most column of the table to zoom to the feature on the map.

Things you might notice:

-1, 0 in Geographic Search page tables: 0 = No, -1 = Yes for the attribute specified in the name of the active layer.

To Search for a River or Lake by Name

Click the query on the toolbar at the left side of the screen.
Select "WaterbodyName" in the first field box
Select "=" in the operator box
Click the Get Samples button to see a list of names
Select the applicable name
Click Add to Query --the box should contain something like this : Waterbody="Niagara River (lower)"
Click Execute

To Obtain Database Record information from a river identified on the Geographic Search viewer:

Use the identify or query tool to view the ReachID, write down the number or numbers, click the Database Search tab at the top, and find the ReachID in the drop down menu, click Submit to view records. We do hope/plan to streamline this to a click of a button, so Coming Soon to a computer near you....

Maintained by U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Updated 1/11/2005