The modern Geographic Information System (GIS) is an enabling technology that provides researchers, administrators, and others with strong new abilities to organize, analyze, and visualize spatial-temporal data. The Department of Natural Resources at the State of Ohio is currently engaged in technical design studies that will lead to the creation of a Lake Erie GIS. The major purpose of this ODNR-based, Lake Erie GIS will be to provide support to the administrative operations required by the Ohio Coastal Management Program. Although databases from this sytem will be available to non-ODNR users under the Freedom of Information Act, they will be of restricted utililty since the operational design of the ODNR GIS will focus narrowly upon data and analysis operations needed to support ODNR administrative operations.

The rapid response funding requested here will be used to extend the current ODNR technical design study to encompass a much wider range of potential users who have significant interests in spatial analysis of databases pertaining to Lake Erie. The product of this investigation will be a GIS technical design, which incorporates and supports the needs of ODNR and the OCMP, that will also be capable of encompassing the requirements of many non-ODNR users. The use of this expanded technical design will permit ODNR to create a system which will be more broadly useful to the community of users concerned with Lake Erie and which, from ODNR's standpoint, will encompass a number of useful databases that are not held by ODNR and other agencies of the State of Ohio.