What is Great Lakes to Gulf?
Great Lakes to Gulf (GLTG) is an interactive website that provides curated nutrient-focused water quality information about the Mississippi River and its tributaries.
GLTG takes a massive amount of complex water quality data from across geographies and standardizes, distills, and presents it in a way that makes the information accessible and easy-to-understand for scientists, managers, advocates, and the interested public.
Curated Conservation Indicators
Importantly, GLTG shows nutrient levels and long-term trends throughout the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin (MARB), suggests relationships between these observed trends and conservation indicators, and serves as an information hub about state efforts to improve water quality. This information can help track the effectiveness of nutrient reduction efforts at federal, state, and local levels and inform future nutrient loss reduction work.
What We Believe
Improving America's water quality is not just good for the environment—it's good for families, communities, and the economy. From farmers to scientists and policymakers to environmental advocates, we welcome everyone to join us in charting a healthy course forward for the Mississippi.
About GLTG Dashboards
Currently, GLTG features sites with five or more years of discrete nutrient data in the main stem of the Mississippi River, continuous water quality monitoring sites in the Mississippi River watershed with nutrient data, and selected small watersheds (HUC-8 or smaller) within each state. GLTG will continue to add additional parameters as they become available.
Nutrient Trends Dashboard
To improve water quality in the MARB we must reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus entering the streams and rivers flowing through the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. These changes take time. This is why we look at long term nutrient trends which can then be related to nutrient management practices.
Datasets
The Nutrient Trends Dashboard provides information on concentrations and loads of nitrogen and phosphorus from over 200 sites having 20 years of data collection. The data we used were taken from the Water Quality Portal and standardized to be comparable across states. Not all water quality monitoring sites met the criteria for our analysis which used the WRTDS method.
State Tracker Dashboard
The 12 Hypoxia Task Force (HTF) states are working to reduce concentrations of nutrients in our waterways to safeguard public health, improve the quality of drinking water, protect aquatic life and prevent harmful algal blooms as well as to reduce the size of the Hypoxic Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Datasets
Where available, we've provided the following information for each of the 12 HTF states:
- State Nutrient Loss Reduction Plan
- Nutrient Dashboards
- Additional Water Quality Resources
- Nutrient Storymaps
Explore Data Dashboard
If you are interested in nutrients and related water quality data from a particular location or from a specific watershed, this tool can help you find it.
Datasets
There are multiple organizations throughout the MARB that collect water quality data. We have focused on long-term state and federal nutrient data contained in the EPA/USGS Water Quality Portal, other USGS data on nutrients and flow, and several regional long-term datasets.
Questions?
Suggestions for additional data?
Want to reach a team member?
Please Contact Us
Our Partners
The Great Lakes to Gulf is a cyber-infrastructure framework constructed in collaboration with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the National Great Rivers with funding provided by National Great Rivers and the Walton Family Foundation
Funding
