Beaver Island planning natural-resource evidence crosswalk, 2017–2024

Summary

This crosswalk turns the ecology portions of three held planning editions into source-bounded, queryable evidence: the 2017 Beaver Island Master Plan, its 2023 update, and the 2024–2028 Peaine Township recreation plan. It contains 17 records covering soils, glacial and coastal landforms, wetlands, inland waters, forests and tree types, vegetation, fish, animals, birds, rare species, invasive species, stewardship, and planning maps.

The editions are retained separately. The 2017 plan establishes the earlier natural-resource baseline and map set; the 2023 plan updates the ecological, fishery, invasive-species, disease, and sensitive-feature discussion; and the 2024 recreation plan supplies a particularly clear natural-resource inventory for woodlands, wetlands, hydric soils, water resources, fish and wildlife, and rare species and invasive plants.

What the planning record adds

Soils, landforms, and land use

The plans repeat four generalized soil associations: Deer Park–Dune Land– Eastport, Kalkaska–Mancelona, Roscommon–Charlevoix–Mackinac, and Emmet– Leelanau. They connect those associations to beach ridges and dunes, lake plains and valley trains, moraines, drainage, forests, wetlands, farming, development, slope, runoff, and erosion. This gives the soil and geology themes a dated planning vocabulary that can be compared with the USDA survey, SSURGO, EGLE geology, and MNFI evidence.

The same documents describe Critical Dune Areas, vegetation removal and earthmoving controls, and the use of maps for dunes, wetlands, soil associations, slope, elevation, and sensitive features. These are planning representations and policy categories, not parcel-scale determinations or complete natural boundaries.

Forests, trees, and vegetation

The 2017 and 2023 editions describe boreal, dry-mesic northern, mesic northern, conifer-swamp, northern-hardwood, lowland-deciduous, and lowland-coniferous forest types. Their quoted interior-forest account names sugar maple, tamarack, black spruce, white cedar, red and white pine, balsam fir, and eastern hemlock, while also noting old fields, pastures, and clear-cuts. The 2024 plan adds the planning concerns of Emerald Ash Borer and Beech Bark Disease and links forest recreation to tree hazards.

These statements are useful bridges between historical GLO vegetation, circa-1800 cover, modern forest layers, and natural-community occurrences. They do not constitute a current stand map, complete tree census, or disease survey.

Wetlands, water, fish, animals, and birds

The planning record identifies coastal wetlands, inland lakes, fens, bogs, marshes, lake and stream networks, hydric soils, flood and drainage concerns, and potential restoration areas. The 2023 edition adds trout-stream and fish- habitat language, migratory fish, aquatic-invasive monitoring, and the limits of island-wide water-quality data. The 2024 edition records fish-passage and culvert concerns and describes Beaver Island as a migratory-bird stopover with resident, seasonal, waterfowl, raptor, loon, and shorebird context.

This is a strong connective layer for the wetland, aquatic-fauna, wildlife, and bird records already in this archive. It remains planning and visitor-information evidence rather than a standardized survey, population estimate, occupancy layer, catch series, or legal wetland delineation.

Rare species, invasive species, and stewardship

The 2017–2024 plans preserve a history of rare-species and invasive-species surveys, natural-community work, Terrestrial Invasive Species Program and CAKE CISMA collaboration, forest disease concerns, Piping Plover and other species-of-concern context, education, monitoring, mapping, and native-species protection. The 2023 plan also records institutional roles for DNR, tribal governments, CMU, Little Traverse Conservancy, and volunteer organizations.

The crosswalk deliberately labels these as planning syntheses or recommendations. A mention of monitoring, treatment, mapping, a sensitive feature, or a partner is not evidence that a particular action happened or that a species occurs at every place named in the plan.

Method and limits

The generator uses deliberate section windows over the held OCR text, rather than unconstrained keyword extraction. Each record retains its edition, source document, section, page range, OCR line range, normalized excerpt, ecology domains, interpretation, and limits. The provenance file stores SHA-256 checksums for the source PDFs and OCR derivatives.

The PDF should be consulted when OCR has merged the plan’s columns or tables. The crosswalk is an index into planning evidence, not a replacement for the official plan, a field survey, a parcel record, a zoning ordinance, a permit, or an implementation record.

Sources

See the sources: block above and the generated JSON/provenance files.

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes