Summary

Description

2011 Vegetation Classification for Mud Lake, MN/SD Vegetation Project Report, OMBIL Environmental Stewardship - Level 1 Inventory. Mud Lake, located on the Minnesota and South Dakota border near the headwaters of the Red River in Traverse County, is an important breeding and migration staging area for waterfowl. Mud Lake is approximately 2,500 acres in area with a maximum depth of 7 feet. Due to the shallow depths, little fishing occurs on the Lake during the summer. Most fishing occurs from shore or during the winter. The most common species of fish in Mud Lake are Northern pike and Walleye. Land use in the surrounding watershed has historically been dominated by pasture/agricultural. Mud Lake is the north pool of the Lake Traverse Flood Control Project on the Boix de Sioux River. Land use changes in the watershed and reservoir water level management practices have reduced the value of Mud Lake as a waterfowl habitat. Water level stabilization has resulted in a decrease of aquatic macrophyte growth (both submerged and emergent) and a reduction in the invertebrate communities present in the Lake. The Lake Traverse Flood Control Project has developed plans to restore Mud Lake in order to create better fish spawning and waterfowl breeding habitats as well as other aquatic enhancement/restoration activities. The primary objective of the project is to map and describe the existing (currently on the ground) plant communities and to create a spatially referenced vegetation database for use in geographic information systems (GIS). The project provides an inventory of vegetation communities at Mud Lake with descriptive botanical and ecological information. The scope of work includes the mapping of vegetation types to the lowest hierarchical level of the National Vegetation Classification Standard (NVCS), a field survey to verify imagery signatures as they relate to the NVCS with map classification, mapping of all terrestrial and aquatic vegetation within the boundary of the Government provided project area, and developing an ArcGIS Geodatabase with spatial vegetation.