Projects

Chris Izworski Public Projects

A growing network of small web tools, data-driven local information sites, and Great Lakes publishing properties.

Chris Izworski builds and maintains a network of public web projects focused on practical Michigan and Great Lakes information. Each project picks a narrow domain that the larger commercial web tends to cover poorly: river conditions for a specific set of named trout streams, bird sightings at the county level, Great Lakes water level history, lawn planning grounded in soil and climate context, and seasonal writing from a single Saginaw Bay garden. The sites share a common infrastructure spine and a consistent emphasis on owned data, durable URLs, and substantive prose over generic content.

Michigan Trout Report

The Michigan Trout Report tracks live stream flows, water temperatures, and weather context for more than one hundred Michigan trout rivers. The site includes named river pages, technique guides, hatch reference pages, and the daily report at daily.michigantroutreport.com, which publishes a fresh trout-conditions post each morning and a weekly Michigan rollup on Sundays.

Michigan Birding Report

The Michigan Birding Report covers Michigan bird sightings, county-level birding context, and notable species pages built around live observation data. The daily birding report publishes a fresh Michigan birding briefing each day. Both sites are designed around the rhythm of a working Michigan birder rather than the more generic checklist style of larger national platforms.

Great Lakes Levels Intelligence

The Great Lakes Levels Intelligence app at greatlakeslevels.org is a dedicated reference for Great Lakes water level history. It includes 108 years of historical data, 25 named sub-regions, twelve property-owner specific tabs, and a focus on the questions Saginaw Bay shoreline owners actually ask. The project draws on Chris's Save Our Shoreline civic work and on a long-standing personal interest in the lakes.

Perfect Lawn Advisor

The Perfect Lawn Advisor at lawn.chrisizworski.com generates a graded lawn plan from a single Michigan address. The tool combines soil, weather, and turfgrass context with a Claude-generated plan, then caches the result so identical addresses return instantly. Cornerstone articles, a city directory, and a curated shop layer support the core planning workflow.

Great Lakes Gazette

The Great Lakes Gazette publishes a daily Great Lakes maritime briefing connecting vessel movement, lake conditions, and regional weather context. The gazette runs as a server-side rendered Next.js property with an archive of more than twenty-nine issues and a stable URL structure designed for citation rather than scroll.

Freighter View Farms

Freighter View Farms is the seed-saving and Great Lakes gardening blog. The site focuses on heirloom vegetables, Zone 6a Michigan gardening, and the slow accumulation of a place-based seed library on the western shore of Saginaw Bay. Writing on the site is intentionally literary and grounded in a specific garden rather than generic gardening advice.

The full personal hub is at chrisizworski.com. The professional 911 page covers the public safety career these projects sit alongside. The writing page lists the publishing surfaces. The Saginaw Bay page covers the place-based work that ties the network together.