Outdorly Planner

About BWCA Planner

A product of Krumtech LLC · krumtech.com

BWCA Planner is built on top of public, authoritative datasets. Every layer, every lake attribute, and every routing decision traces back to one of the sources below.

Lakes & hydrography

Lake outlines, depth, fish, and water-quality attributes come from Minnesota's authoritative datasets. River and stream networks come from the federal hydrography dataset.

  • Minnesota DNR Hydrography
    Lake polygons keyed by DOWLKNUM, basin names, acreage, shore length, lake class.
  • Minnesota DNR LakeFinder
    Fish species, max/mean depth, lake survey availability, water-quality flags, invasive species.
  • USGS National Hydrography Dataset (NHD)
    River and stream flowlines, stream order, river-network topology used by the route graph.

Recreation infrastructure

Entry points are authoritative USFS data. Portages come from a hand-maintained community dataset. Campsites, outfitters, towns, and outdoor POIs come from OpenStreetMap, with USFS data as a fallback for campsites.

  • USFS Eastern Region Data Warehouse
    Superior National Forest entry points, recreation sites, trails, and managed campsites (used as a fallback when OSM coverage is incomplete).
  • Community-maintained BWCA portage dataset
    Authoritative source for the ~907 BWCA portages, including rod length and routing topology. Augmented with hand-curated overrides where field reports diverge from the upstream geometry.
  • OpenStreetMap
    Campsites (primary), outfitters, towns, and outdoor POIs (viewpoints, waterfalls, rapids, peaks, shelters). © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Wildlife & nature

Species observations sourced from biodiversity records.

  • GBIF Occurrence data
    Animal and plant species sightings recorded inside the BWCA, with year and observer metadata.

Wildfire history

Recent fire perimeters layered over the map.

  • Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS)
    Fire perimeters, burn area, year, and fire type for fires over 1,000 acres.

Elevation & terrain

Hillshade, slope, contours, and elevation profiles for portages all derive from the federal elevation program.

  • USGS 3D Elevation Program
    Digital elevation model used to render hillshade, generate slope rasters, derive 20-foot contours, and profile portage elevation gain.