This collection includes raster layers (as a geodatabase) with ice metrics for each of the Great Lakes representing the historical time period of 1898-1960. One metric is spatial mean ice duration (the number of days per year when the lake was frozen) and the other is coefficient of variation of ice duration (variability across years).
Archives at the Institute for Fisheries Research (IFR) hold meticulous records of thousands of lake surveys from the University of Michigan and Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Starting more than a century ago, surveys have been used to understand how fish were distributed across the state, which lakes would support sportfishing, and how lakes should be managed. We can now use these records of lake conditions and fish abundance and growth to understand how climate change and other factors have impacted fish communities. and The records contained in this collection are digitized records from the IFR surveys stored as jpeg image files. This collection includes information on both lake factors (e.g. depth, nutrients, temperature) and fishes (e.g. species, catch, length). Scanned cards were organized by card type and each dataset in this collection is for a specific card type.