Introducing : the WIRE Net
Welcome to the Wetland Inventory for Research and Education Network (WIRE Net). This website is maintained by the Coastal Wetland Research Group at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The Network disseminates research results on the ecological functions of Great Lakes coastal wetlands.
Primary Research
The heart of WIRE Net is a centralized binational GIS database, created in 1997 to provide analyses for a discussion paper for the 1998 State of the Lakes Conference (Chow-Fraser and Albert 1998). This comprehensive database contains:
- Wetland centroids or polygons for most of the Canadian wetlands and 100 of the U.S. wetlands sampled by the Michigan Natural Features Inventory (Minc (1997).
- Medium resolution vector shoreline data for the entire coastline of the Great Lakes (NOAA 1999: ftp://ftp.glerl.noaa.gov/gis/shoreline/).
- Forty-four "eco-reach" delineations, which are functional shoreline units based on geomorphology, ecological characteristics, and wetland development, which should be useful for developing hierarchical sampling programs (Chow-Fraser and Albert 1998).
Other information such as land use patterns in wetland catchments, water quality data sampled from over 100 wetlands,and presence/absence of submergent plants, zooplankton and fish for a large subset of the wetlands are also included. This database has been used in publications by Crosbie and Chow-Fraser (1999), Lougheed et al. (2001) and Lougheed and Chow-Fraser (2002).
Fish Distributions
Published data from a historic fish survey (i.e. Goodyear et al.'s 1982 Atlas of Spawning and Nursery Habitat) have been imported into the WIRE Net database. Fully formatted maps of fish distributions are available for download in the Fish Habitat section.
Wetland Maps
A pilot project was funded by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to create a centralized binational inventory of existing maps of coastal wetlands of Lake Ontario. The results of this report can be perused and downloaded from the Wetland Atlas. A similar project partly funded by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources is currently being undertaken for Georgian Bay.
This site is copyright Dr. Patricia Chow-Fraser. McMaster University