All Projects

Minnesota Trout Unlimited volunteers, chapters and partners will enhance habitat for fish, game and wildlife in and along numerous coldwater streams on existing Aquatic Management Areas and other public lands around the state, while leveraging approximately $3 million for this.

This project will create a high accuracy elevation dataset - critical for effectively planning and implementing water quality projects - for the state of Minnesota using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and geospatial mapping technologies. Although some areas of the state have been mapped previously, many counties remain unmapped or have insufficient or inadequate data. This multi-year project, to be completed in 2012, is a collaborative effort of Minnesota's Digital Elevation Committee and partners with county surveyors to ensure accuracy with ground-truthing.

To hire a qualified historian to complete an evaluation to determine eligibility for listing in the National Register of Historic Places for the Minnetonka Beach Water Tower.

To hire a qualified consultant to prepare a collections management policies and procedures document.

To hire a qualified historian to complete an updated nomination to the National Register of Historic Places for the historic Minnetonka Town Hall, now owned and used by Minnetonka Community Church.

To support students' acquisition of Ojibwe and Dakota language and culture that begins in early childhood immersion at Anishinaabe Academy and firmly establish this learning into daily, regular classroom and community behavior. Strengthen and support the existing language pathways through 12th grade and extend our focus on the development and implementation of a strong Dakota language curriculum.

A 5.8-mile shoreline assessment completed in Summer 2020 along the Mississippi River shoreline in Brooklyn Park comprehensively surveyed erosion issues and identified numerous riverfronts severely eroding into the river, contributing significant sediment and nutrient loads. The report catalogued these properties and identified a set of properties west of Banfill Island as the most critical and cost-effective for restoration.

Refinement of the Sediment Recution Strategy through incorporation of feedback gather during 30-day comment period.

Construction of an engineered and designed three-quarter mile segment of the Mississippi Blufflands State Trail along Red Wing's Mississippi River riverfront, from Barn Bluff Regional Park to Colvill Park.

This project will build a working watershed SWAT model that can readily be used by the MPCA to provide information to support conventional parameter TMDLs and to identify critical areas for BMP installation/evaluation that can be supported by the efforts of the local Farmer Led Council as well as other land owners within the Mississippi River-Winona watershed.

This project will investigate the effects of different farming practices on soil health and nitrogen loss in a minimally tilled, corn-soybean farming rotation in Southeast Minnesota. The project area is a roughly 20 acre, pattern tiled field that will be split into two fields of nearly equal sizes. This will be a paired comparison of a control field and a treatment field where cover crops will be employed. Nitrogen loss will be monitored via two tile control structures and routine collection and analysis of tile water.

Design, engineer, and implement improvements called for in the 1982 plan for the Bohemian Flats area, and also improve various facilities throughout the park including trails, stairways, walls, and interpretive and wayfinding signs. These improvements will include trails, pathways, fishing and other river access, shoreline restoration, parking, informational signage, and visitor comfort facilities. The new master plan currently underway will use community participation to determine exact priority projects funded under this request.

This project will focus on significant park improvements throughout the park as identified in the Master Plan.

Whitewater Watershed Project will work in coordination with Winona County, Root River (Houston County) Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD), and Wabasha County SWCD to collect water quality and chemistry parameters on eight  Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) approved stream sites and two lake sites within the Mississippi River Winona/La Crescent watershed during the 2020-2021 sampling season. Parameters to be tested include: TSS, TP, Chloride, CaCO3 (hardness), E. Coli, Chl - a corrected for Pheo, hardness, specific conductance, clarity, temperature, pH, DO.

The goal of this project is to complete the construction, calibration, and validation of a Hydrological Simulation Program – FORTRAN (HSPF) watershed model for a portion of the Mississippi River-Lake Pepin watershed.

This project will identify areas for potential Best Management Practice (BMP) placement and identify strategies to strengthen social capacity and effectively engage citizens in development of the upcoming Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategy (WRAPS) report.

This project will address Step 2b in the Watershed approach process and computation of TMDLS for those impaired waters determined to be in need of them.

This project proposes utilizing a precision conservation framework to assess two small impaired agricultural watersheds (HUC12) to determine optimal locations of best management practices and structures on the landscape that will address local water quality issues in a more strategic manner. The watershed assessment process will create GIS-generated maps that will be available to local SWCD staff that will inform decision-making for interested landowners.

The DNR has been charged by the legislature to develop rules that protect and manage the Mississippi River Corridor Critical Area (MRCCA) for natural resource, economic development, transportation, historic preservation, and other values. This project engages stakeholder groups in a public process to balance regulatory protections with local flexibility and control.

This project is for a contract with Emmons & Olivier Resources Inc to develop Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs; a federal clean Water Act requirement) and a Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategy (WRAPS) report for the for Mississippi River - LaCrescent and Winnebago River watersheds.