ACADEMIC
MN/DNR/GIS
Welcome to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resource's Geographic Information Systems page. GIS has been a part of tool used by DNR Staff since the early 1970s. During that time work was performed by a few DNR units, on a project by project basis, in coordination with the Minnesota Land Management Information System (MLMIS) at the University of Minnesota. At that time most of the work was done using early versions of what now is EPPL7. In the mid 1980s, GIS began to make some major headway in the Department, when the Division of Forestry purchased "Hal", a PRIME 2250 minicomputer, to manage forest inventories using ARC/INFO. In 1991, the DNR's first GIS UNIX workstations were purchased and GIS data layers, map products and tools began to be developed by various DNR units.