Building an adaptive tool for mapping habitat and species to support the Great Lakes coregonine conservation and restoration framework

Contributing Authors

Executive Summary

The work presented here, a database and dataset documenting historical spawning and nursery areas for coregonines (the database is now called CORHIST), is the result of several years of research in archives, libraries, and through published and unpublished materials. Our goal was to track down evidence of spawning and/or nursery locations for the Coregoninae sub-family of ciscoes and whitefishes in the Great Lakes of North America and their tributaries, accurately identify location information to a coordinate level, and index all associated data and metadata with a database built specifically for these types of records. CORHIST is a database capable of storing historical, geospatial, and biological data. Data for a total of 11 accepted species of coregonines historically occurring in the Great Lakes basin are included in this dataset. A total of 3493 occurrence records have been entered into CORHIST, over 2200 of which are for cisco (Coregonus artedi) and lake whitefish (C. clupeaformis). These data were collected to create a single, Great Lakes basin-wide, dataset containing all known historical spawning locations for coregonines. These data are sortable and mappable and can be used to inform the planning and implementation phases of the Coregonine Restoration Framework (CRF) in the Great Lakes (Bunnell et al. 2023).