Watershed-based Stressors for the Great Lakes Basin

The Watershed-based Stressors for the Great Lakes Basin dataset includes component and aggregated measures of environmental stress to coastal ecosystems from watersheds of the Great Lakes Basin. Stressors include the amount of agricultural and developed land use, as well as road and population density. These summaries are based on a set of 5971 watersheds that cover the US and Canadian Great Lakes basin, derived using methods from Hollenhorst et al. (2007). Indices presented in this dataset include SumRel (Host et al. 2011) and the more recent combined Agriculture and Development - AgDev index (Host et al. 2019). These were developed as part of the Great Lakes Environmental Indicators II (GLEI-II) project, funded through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and used to quantify the response of biota (birds, fish, macroinvertebrates, diatoms and wetland vegetation) to varying degrees of watershed stress (Kovalenko et al. 2014). As of 2015, a more recent version of watersheds has been created by the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework and stressors recalculated based on those watersheds.