Beaver Island Master Plan ecology map-plate evidence, 2017–2024

Summary

This index preserves the ecology map plates in the 2017 and 2023 Beaver Island Master Plans and the 2024–2028 Peaine Township recreation plan as source-page derivatives. It contains 25 visually checked map-page records: seven from 2017, fifteen from 2023, and three from 2024. The records cover barrier dunes, coastal wetlands, inland lakes and streams, wetlands and potential restoration, soil associations, soil slope, elevation, critical dunes, and wetlands and soils in the recreation plan.

The image files are page-faithful working assets for search, comparison, and future digitization. They preserve the planning cartography, legends, labels, and source-page context; they are not newly drawn current maps.

Scope and coverage

The 2017 set is a Beaver Island map set. The 2023 set repeats the seven natural-resource plates for Beaver Island and adds paired selected-archipelago plates. It also includes Map 2.16, “Tree Canopy,” on PDF page 41 (printed page 41). That page is a map-catalog spread with a small Beaver Island thumbnail and the statement that the map shows the relative density of tree canopy; it is not a full-size canopy raster or a species/stand map. The 2024 recreation plan supplies composite critical-dune/slope, wetland, and soil plates centered on Beaver Island and selected surrounding coverage.

The selected-archipelago plates in the 2023 edition display Beaver, High, Garden, Hog, Gull, Hat, Shoe, Trout, Whiskey, and Ojibwa Islands. The current project island reference also contains North Fox Island and South Fox Island, but neither Fox Island appears in those selected-archipelago plate labels. The 2024 plates likewise omit the Fox Islands from the displayed coverage. This is a map-scope and coverage finding—not evidence that the Fox Islands lack dunes, wetlands, soils, slope, or elevation features. The Fox Islands remain connected to the ecology themes through their source-specific GLO, EGLE, MNFI, and soil evidence.

How to use the plates

Each record in the generated index gives the edition, PDF page, printed-page locator where available, map identifier, title, domain, scope, displayed island names, image path, and SHA-256 checksum. The current GIS comparison is deliberately narrow: it compares declared island names against a current OpenStreetMap island-name reference. It does not compare spatial features, calculate areas, or infer that an unlabelled island is outside a mapped ecological class.

The plates are therefore useful as a dated planning layer between the written natural-resource crosswalk and the more specialized EGLE, NWI, SSURGO, forest, MNFI, GLO, and wildlife datasets. A plan map can show how a feature was represented for planning without serving as a legal wetland delineation, parcel suitability determination, natural-community boundary, or current condition survey.

Tree-canopy connection

Map 2.16 is best treated as qualitative planning context. The current NLCD tree-canopy percentage across the seven islands, 2021 and 2023 supplies the stronger numeric comparison layer: 30 m canopy-percentage values for Beaver, Garden, High, Hog, Whiskey, North Fox, and South Fox Islands in 2021 and 2023. The two records answer different questions. The plan page shows that relative canopy density was a planning concern for Beaver Island; the NLCD extraction provides reproducible island summaries and retains its remote-sensing limits. Neither source identifies tree species, stand age, height, or natural-community boundaries.

Sources

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

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes