Integrating the Great Lakes into the Midwest Conservation Blueprint

Bare Bluff overlooking Lake Superior. Courtney Celley/USFWS

In 2025-2026, the Midwest Landscape Initiative is expanding the Midwest Conservation Blueprint to include the nearshore waters of the Great Lakes.

Overview

The Great Lakes is one of the world’s most treasured freshwater systems and is pivotal to human lives and livelihoods, including drinking water for 40+ million people, an annual $7+ billion fisheries economy, and many other ecosystem services. Many agencies, organizations, and partnerships have expressed the need for plans, designs, and strategies that better align, connect, and integrate the waters of the Great Lakes and the lands within the basin.

What We Plan to Do

The Midwest Conservation Blueprint is already helping to facilitate collaborative approaches across the “continental Midwest.” This includes all lands and waters in the region but does not yet incorporate the waters of the Great Lakes themselves.

The Midwest Landscape Initiative, responsible for stewarding the Midwest Conservation Blueprint, will engage with partners to extend the existing prioritization to include nearshore waters (<30m depth) of the United States portion of the Great Lakes using data that can spatially reflect the socio-ecological indicators and sub-indicators in the 2022 State of the Great Lakes report. This first stage, occurring across 2025-2026 will follow methodologies consistent with the development of the Midwest Conservation Blueprint and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative’s Action Plan IV.

This effort is not intended to supersede local data, knowledge, or authority, but instead is a “basemap” to connect other data, priorities, and plans. Longer-term stages can potentially expand to include the pelagic and Canadian waters of the Great Lakes.

What We Hope to Achieve

By integrating the priorities and waters of the Great Lakes with the Midwest Conservation Blueprint, we can help:

Connect and amplify the existing and diverse partnerships, planning, and implementation activities across the Great Lakes basin.
Integrate land-water planning across the Great Lakes Basin and beyond.

Thank you for your Input!

Thank you for attending our public, interactive webinars to learn more about this process and to actively shape the integration of the priorities and waters of the Great Lakes into the Midwest Conservation Blueprint.

For those who could not attend, you can watch recording from each of the four webinars below:

Thank you for to all who attended for participating in this process. We are incredibly grateful for the time, perspective, and knowledge that you all shared with us. The Midwest Conservation Blueprint a living and breathing thing that can help us achieve healthy lands and waters across the Midwest for the wellbeing of nature and people. None of this work is possible without you, and we will continue to strive to engage all those who live, work, or recreate across the Midwest in this process.

Next Steps

Moving forward, we will:

Conduct the discussed spatial prioritization of the nearshore waters of the Great Lakes consistent with the development of the rest of the Midwest Conservation Blueprint, and

Encourage you to join the Midwest Landscape Initiative’s Habitat Working Group if you’d like to more directly engage in this work! Please reach out to me, alexander_wright@fws.gov, for more details.

FAQs:

I have a question, comment, or concern. Who can I contact?

Contact Alex Wright at alexander_wright@fws.gov. We welcome your input!

Where can I learn more about the Midwest Conservation Blueprint?

Detailed information about the Midwest Conservation Blueprint, including the development process and methodologies, can be found on the Midwest Conservation Blueprint webpage.