This project will initiate the process of community engagement in the LeSueur River watershed by assessing the needs and interests of the community and bringing a diverse set of stakeholders together to determine how best to foster action in improving and protecting water quality.
This program resulted in permanent protection of three parcels totaling 350 acres. All three parcels are now being managed as Wildlife Management Areas (WMA) by MN DNR. This exceeds the original goal of 319 acres. Acquisition of two other parcels were attempted, but the offers were turned down by the sellers.
The Lower Mississippi River Habitat Restoration Partnership is a long-term effort to restore habitat connectivity and improve water quality in critical areas along the Mississippi River corridor from the Twin Cities to the Iowa border by reconnecting tributaries to their floodplains, revitalizing backwaters and channels, and protecting and restoring floodplain forests, wetlands, and prairies that are essential to sustaining the incredible diversity of plants, animals, and human uses provided by this great river.
This project will establish a groundwater monitoring network in the 11 county metropolitan area. The network will provide information about aquifer characteristics and natural water trends by monitoring healthy aquifers (non-stressed systems). The project will also develop an automated system that captures groundwater level and water use data. This system will enhance evaluation of changes in aquifers that are stressed by pumping from existing wells.
A Microfilm Scanner System and associated computer and software were purchased for the Museum. Staff and volunteers were trained in their uses. Improved image quality was immediately noticeable. The purchase enhances the overall plan to preserve local history in Otter Tail County.
Legacy-funded programs at the Minnesota Humanities Center demonstrate our determination to collaboratively create humanities programs for the broader public by forging strong partnerships with local, state, and national cultural organizations. These programs show the broader community how the humanities can be used to address issues important to their everyday lives. Each activity, event, and program shares an Absent Narrative with participants, which help residents across the state engage in a more sophisticated understanding of their community.
Partner Organizations: Preservation Alliance of Minnesota, Department of Employment and Economic Development, University of Minnesota Extension Center for Community Vitality.
The Minnesota Main Street Program is a comprehensive strategy that helps Minnesota communities preserve historic buildings, while providing training, tools and support for commercial revitalization. ACHF funding has enabled the re-launch of this program.
Partner Organization: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Through a partnership with the Minnesota DNR, the Minnesota Historical Society has digitized the full run of the DNR's Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine. All issues of the publication dating back to 1940—or 28,000 pages—are available to the public online.
The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) is a statewide, multi-institutional initiative to make the rich historical resources of the state’s public and academic libraries, archives, museums and historical societies available to the public via the web and to preserve the resources for future generations.
The new Minnesota Naturalist Corps, year-round naturalists and seasonal naturalists will be added at the busiest seasonal parks and trails to expand conservation education programming and increase overall attendance at interpretive programs. The Minnesota Naturalist Corps will offer more interpretive programs as directed by new legislative guidelines.
There are 67 Minnesota State Parks and 7 Minnesota State Recreation areas that each have facilities to serve outdoor recreation users. Funds in this category are used for developing new facilities and include visitor centers, trail centers, roads, parking lots, bridges, campgrounds, and so on.
The grant enabled the Fergus Falls Public Library to supplement and fill gaps in their collection with 13 popular titles on Minnesota history. As the "reference center" for the Viking Library System they are often called upon to locate information on Minnesota, both for local people and those far afield who reach them via telephone or e-mail and the 13 titles they received would help fill them.
HCHS added 29 standard Minnesota history titles to broaden public accessibility to historical resources. The grant was noted in HCHS's newsletter and in four county newspaper press releases.
Midwest Viking Festival (MVF) presents Viking-era arts, cultural traditions, and folkways with demonstrations, hands-on activities, and performances, including weaving, wood-turning, metalwork, carving, fiber dyeing, pottery making, felting, rune writing, songs, and more.
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.
This program proposes a 15-year goal to provide protection to the remaining 90,000 acres of native prairie/savanna, a 20-year goal to restore and protect an additional 500,000 acres of diverse grasslands/savannas, and a 10-year goal to increase management capacity to annually manage 300,000 acres of grassland and savannas per year. This proposal takes the first steps to achieve these goals by initiating a comprehensive, coordinated and collaborative prairie conservation initiative. Annual investments by the LSOHC will be required to realize these ambitious outcomes.
Minnesota Public Radio is the state's largest cultural organization, providing 96 percent of the population with free access to some of the best broadcast cultural programming in the world. Minnesota Public Radio is using a grant from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund to implement projects around the following four goals:
This funding is for arts, arts education, and arts access, and to preserve Minnesota's history and cultural heritage.
The Minnesota Children's Museum will develop a literacy focused exhibit to catalyze community engagement around early childhood learning and education.
Partner Organization: Association of Minnesota Public Educational Radio Stations (AMPERS)
This partnership project with AMPERS, a network of Independent Public Radio stations across Minnesota, has created a series of 130 radio mini-features, 90 seconds in length.
Each episode of MN90 educates listeners about Minnesota history and links an important aspect of our past to current news, events and daily life in an entertaining and informative way.
The Minnesota Historical Society is developing a mobile application that will allow students to investigate Minnesota history anywhere, any place and anytime, using their handheld mobile devices.
In addition, the Society is designing a mobile technology component for the History Center's "Then Now Wow" exhibit (the exhibit's working title was "Our Minnesota") that will enable students to immediately apply what they've learned in exhibits.
This project will use the Spatially Referenced Regression On Watersheds (SPARROW) model as a means of assessing and characterizing the nitrogen loading situation in Minnesota. These results will be used along with other nitrogen loading characterization efforts conducted by others, so that a more complete characterization can be conducted. The results of this effort will be useful as Minnesota works to establish state-specific goals and strategies to address its contribution to Gulf of Mexico hypoxia.
This project supports monitoring and assessment activities by MPCA EAO staff and includes lab analysis, equipment, and fieldwork expenses associated with monitoring and assessment activities.
Lake Monitoring: Lakes are monitored for nutrients, clarity and other information to provide the data needed to assess the aquatic recreation use support.
