The Minnesota Main Street program is a proven, comprehensive strategy that helps communities create new jobs and businesses while revitalizing buildings and preserving their historic downtowns. MNHS's Heritage Preservation department works with the partners
listed above to implement Minnesota Main Street,
which provides the tools, training, information, and networking that communities need to revitalize their business districts.
There are currently seven Minnesota Main Street designated communities: Faribault, New Ulm, Owatonna, Red Wing, Shakopee, Willmar, and Winona.
The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) is a statewide, multi-institutional collaboration that supports discovery, education, and personal enrichment through digitization of and access to the rich historical resources of the state's public and academic libraries, archives, museums and historical societies, while also preserving these resources for future generations.
MDL partnered with:
The goal of this project is to design and implement a spatial framework for agricultural nutrient budget assessment and tracking in the state of Minnesota. This analysis can be repeated on a defined frequency to assess progress toward narrowing the difference between applied nutrients and crop nutrient needs across the State. The work conducted will provide an improved nutrient budget assessment, maps to use when looking at nutrient balance results in watersheds around the state, and a framework from which future nutrient budget assessments can become more accurate.
Vegetation is an important component of effective stormwater management and green infrastructure. The Minnesota Stormwater Manual currently has limited and poorly organized information on this topic to guide stormwater practitioners and managers. This project will result in recommendations for how to organize and incorporate information on vegetation into the manual. In addition, information on deicers will be enhanced.
The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) will conduct water sample analysis and collect data for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to meet the requirements of the MPCA’s environmental programs.
The Minnesota Ag Water Quality Certification Program (MAWQCP) is a voluntary opportunity for farmers and agricultural landowners to take the lead on implementing conservation practices that protect water quality. Those who implement and maintain approved conservation practices will be certified and in turn obtain regulatory certainty for a period of ten years. This program will help address concerns about changing regulatory requirements from multiple state and federal agencies.
The Minnesota Water Research Digital Library (MnWRL) is a user-friendly, searchable inventory of water research relevant to Minnesota. It includes both peer-reviewed articles as well as white papers and reports. The Library provides 'one-stop' access to all types of water research.
This is a forest restoration project within the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area to address the loss of ash trees to EAB and plant 15,000 native trees and plants.
This project will assist in assessing the quality of the Mississippi River bordering with Wisconsin in partnership with the Minnesota DNR (MNDNR), the Wisconsin DNR (WIDNR) and the Metropolitan Council of Environmental Services (MCES). Sampling will be conducted in 2016 using water chemistry and biological indicators, using a 5 state strategy recently developed recently with the leadership of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association. The Minnesota entities will focus their work on the River from St Anthony Falls to the Chippewa River confluence in Lake Pepin.
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 MNHS Indian Advisory Committee (IAC) is made up of representatives appointed by the 11 federally recognized tribes in Minnesota and other educators. IAC advises on planning, development and evaluation of MNHS activities and initiatives, including exhibits, publications, public programs, and curatorial policy as they relate to the research, collection, preservation and interpretation of Minnesota and American Indian history in Minnesota. Relationships among IAC members, MNHS and tribal communities are supported by three annual meetings held in tribal communities around the state.
The MNHS Indian Advisory Committee (IAC) is made up of tribally appointed representatives of the 11 Minnesota tribes, as well as representatives of key groups, such as educators. IAC advises on planning, developing, and evaluating MNHS activities and initiatives including exhibitions, publications, public programs, and curatorial policy as they relate to the research, collection, preservation, and interpretation of Minnesota and American Indian history in Minnesota.
The Minnesota Historical Society has launched and is expanding MNopedia, the first online encyclopedia about Minnesota. MNopedia is a growing digital resource that provides reliable, multimedia entries related to the state and its history. MNopedia will be tested, refined and broadened with additional content and tools, giving students, teachers, researchers and the general public greater access to information, images, documents and other historical resources relating to Minnesota.
MNopedia and MinnPost, an online news organization, are working together to share content and make Minnesota history more accessible. MNopedia is the first digital encyclopedia about Minnesota. All MNopedia articles are prepared by historians, consulting experts, professional writers, and others vetted by the Minnesota Historical Society. Once a week, MinnPost will publish a MNopedia article on its website. In addition, twice a month for the next ten months, MinnPost will create and publish news articles that relate to historical events in Minnesota.
MNopedia is an award-winning online encyclopedia of Minnesota created by MNHS, designed for use by a general audience, teachers and students. In 2016, MNopedia added many new essays covering everything from the history of Northwest Airlines to American Indian boarding schools. MNopedia also surpassed 500 articles and 1.5 million page views on its website this year. Since the project launched in 2011, the website has had 408,123 unique visitors.
MNopedia (www.mnopedia.org) is a free, reliable, award-winning online encyclopedia of Minnesota, created and managed by the Minnesota Historical Society. MNopedia authors, many of whom are volunteer specialists, create rich entry packages, including text, multimedia and bibliographic resources that tell the stories of their communities and our state. New articles are published weekly. This unique resource, written and designed for use by general audiences as well as teachers and students, provides easy access to the shared history of all Minnesotans.
MNopedia is an award-winning online encyclopedia of Minnesota created by MNHS, designed for use by a general audience, teachers, and students. In 2015, the MNopedia library grew to include essays on Hmong, African American, and Jewish history, and articles on topics as diverse as Minnesota in World War I, immigration to the Iron Range, Dayton's department store, and the Grange in Minnesota. A new feature, This Day in Minnesota History, a Minnesota book of days, was added.
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 assess the exposure and effects of WWTP effluent on a model vertebrae organism, the fathead minnow. Through a series of controlled experiments, to be conducted on-site of the WWTP utilizing the Mobile Exposure Laboratory Trailer (MELT),SCSU will address (1) onset and timing of acute exposure effects, (2) downstream exposure effects, and (3) reproductive consequences of exposure for male and female fathead minnows. MPCA EAO staff will provide technical assistance and oversight of the project.
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.
Using data supplied by Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), this project will model the relationship between sulfate and sulfide in wild rice habitats.
This project is part of a long-term, collaborative effort that will lead to cleaner water through targeted implementation projects and programs. It will accelerate the adoption of alternative culvert designs that improve biological connectivity and channel stability, reduce the flood stage and lower long-term infrastructure maintenance costs.
Moose, one of Minnesota's prized wildlife species, are dying at much higher rates in Minnesota than elsewhere in North America. Recently observed increases in mortality rates amongst some moose in northeastern Minnesota have led to concern that the population there may be entering a decline like that seen in the northwestern part of the state, where moose populations fell from over 4,000 to fewer than 100 in less than 20 years. Additionally the specific causes of increased mortality amongst individual moose remain under investigation.
The City of Morris and several partners will develop a model community for energy and environmental stewardship which will serve as a roadmap for other small communities across the state.
