The Obtawaing Coastal Resilience Planning Project was a 2-year project completed in Fall 2025 to address collaborative efforts identifying and prioritizing coastal resilience projects and conservation efforts within the Obtawaing Biosphere Region (OBR), located in northern Michigan. The project defined coastal resilience as ability of “communities, infrastructure, ecosystems and economy to withstand, adapt to, and recover from persistent stressors and changing conditions.” Ultimately, the OBR project has helped to: improve opportunities for coordination and collaboration; incorporate local perspectives into regional planning; elevate site-level planning to the landscape level; and, identify and prioritize large-scale, high impact coastal resilience projects. Project deliverables include a Prioritization Toolset, with a series of three separate tools: 1) a Project Mapper, 2) two Zonation Prioritization Models (including ecological and community indicators), and 3) a customizable suitability model that allows users to define the analysis, run their own model, and visualize the results in a heat map. These tools, along with a project scoring system developed by the OBR Project Management Team, led to the prioritization of the first round of coastal resilience projects in summer 2025. Prioritization assists in decision-making for practitioners, communities, and funders often faced with realities of limited resources to carry out projects.
