Autumn colors are coming to a peak (edit: now past) here in Southeast Michigan, about right on time this year. They dissipated a bit faster than I would have liked. I took an opportunity to visit a nearby 90-acre nature preserve. Places like this are far and few between in such a highly-developed area. It wasn’t always preserved, only since the once clearcut farmland was ultimately turned over to the City of Sterling Heights. There aren’t even foot trails for access. This preserve is enhanced by being adjacent to a 40-acre parcel owned by a local hospital conglomerate (also previously farmland) that one can hope never gets sold off. That makes the floodplain forest/wetland that now exists here relatively young, but an important piece of green infrastructure (although highly overrun with phragmites) to mitigate stormwater runoff. You would think a preserve like this has a name that would make it relatively easy to find, right?

The rabbit hole this post goes down into is somewhat hyper-local. So I don’t know if it is of any interest to many “outsiders” reading, but there are some general lessons to be learned about our need to be increasingly vigilant about what we understand as “truth.” We need to be careful about what references we use and expect to be correct. It isn’t any type of conspiracy, just an acknowledgment that in an age of so much information at our fingertips, the volume of data fallible humans have to manage, attention to detail and sourcing is increasingly important. But also important to me is the integrity of provenance. It is as important as ever in the age of fake news, disinformation campaigns, and AI-generated content.

Sterling Heights Nature Preserve or Plumbrook Nature Preserve?

I rely on a lot of different mapping data when researching photo locations, even one close to home. In this particular preserve, even though there are no trails, there is a parking lot with a full brick-and-mortar restroom. It is a seemingly odd combination – you can park here, not walk anywhere, but at least there is a modern bathroom. It would be a great spot for an observation tower. Anyway, the sign at the lot generically says “Nature Preserve.” It’s a location I’ve visited many times, poking around trail-less fringes which are thick brush. There are developments and other names in the area referencing, ironically, “the preserve.”

Over the years, I’ve also come across occasions where this location is called the “Plumbrook Nature Preserve“, generically “Nature Preserve“, and on many online maps it is called “Sterling Heights Nature Preserve.”

I suppose being trained as an engineer, you develop a predisposition to be particular (sometimes obsessively) about details and data. As a photographer, you like to keyword and caption accurately. Add on top some German DNA and you have a powerful combination! Because of the intentionally limited access, maybe few care because it isn’t frequently visited. But it nagged at me – bigly! This city paid a lot of money to have nice signs in front of all of their parks. If this one had a name, why was it generic on the sign? Did anyone know? So at one point, I asked a city staff member, explaining the variations, “What is the name….exactly?”

The gentleman was the head of the Office of Planning at the time – he didn’t know but would check. The name came back as “Plumbrook Nature Preserve.” Whew! It’s finally settled! I didn’t ask for proof and took him at his word. I suppose it makes sense, a creek called Plum Brook runs through there. “Plumbrook” is a popular local name for a lot of places.

But wait, there is another …

Fast forward some time and I see it mentioned online back around 2019. Wow, someone else actually knew of the place! The place isn’t a secret, but because it is kind of tucked away with no real access (as a nature preserve should be), many locals don’t even know about it. But, confusion ensued as the discussion continued. An exchange of comments resulted in them oddly pointing to a location a couple of miles to the southeast. Same city, a completely different spot. Another “Plumbrook Nature Preserve?” This I had to see for myself.

Sure enough, a little parcel of land tucked away in an industrial district had an appropriately named preserve sign, complete with trails. An illustrative map detailed several water features, historical structures, and two creeks flowing through, “Crissman Creek” and “Plumbrook River.”

The map orientation is that East is facing up – something the illustrator missed. One of the industrial buildings is partially shown at the “You are Here” mark. That means Crissman Creek flows into the preserve from the North, and the Plumbrook flows into the area from the West. It is a privately owned preserve by some of the landowners in the industrial district, apparently with the support of Sierra Club, Ducks Unlimited, and Audubon.

So as it would appear, the city has two preserves, a city-owned one named Plumbrook Nature Preserve (sign with the generic “nature preserve” name) and the other a privately-owned, much smaller one called Plumbrook Preserve. (sign with the specific name) Again, with “Plumbrook” being a featured waterway in both – go figure how anyone could get confused!

Crissman Creek, as noted on signage near the Stone Bridge on the illustration is a creek that was used to drain the area’s farmers’ fields. They did need to be drained because the entire area was built on top of the historical lakebed and wetlands of Lake St. Clair. It flooded frequently, prompting the carving of more drainage around the entire area. Not very surprising when you fill in wetlands and remove nearly all the trees. The preserves are a positive direction for the future.

A Tale of Two Drains

For a little while, I thought I had all of this squared away on what was what. The city had two Plumbrook Preserves. Not a big deal, I guess, but perhaps should be nicknamed “Big Plumbrook” and “Little Plumbrook.” I could very well be the ONLY one who has spent any brain cells on this. For my recent visit to make some autumn aerial photos at “Big Plumbrook,” I did some area scouting by pulling up a map on my phone. I saw that the waterway flowing through it was named “Chrissman Drain.” Wait…. what??! (expecting it to be labeled Plumbrook) I thought it must just be an error with Apple Maps, surprise, surprise. (Just kidding Apple, I know it is much improved over what it was)

Enter rabbit hole #2 (cue music). I cross-checked it with Google Maps, Open Street Maps, ESRI ArcGIS, and even up to the USGS. All of them had Plumbrook Creek named “Chrissman Drain” with variable spellings. To double the confusion, all of these same maps had the actual Crissman Creek labeled as “Plum Brook.” I felt like I had entered the cartography twilight zone. The names had been switched!! By whom? And When? Is it a test?

Well, this just can’t be. If these online maps are correct, I need to go back to the start with the city guy. As Dallas Green sings “…there ain’t enough whiskey in this world to ease a tormented mind.“¹ This is where the importance of provenance comes in. Provenance eases the tormented mind, maybe with the help of a single malt.

The concerning aspect of this was how multiple online sources had the same wrong information with the streams flipped, including the U.S. government. I just happened to have stumbled upon it. Perhaps all are using the same corrupted dataset, which then propagates errors across many different systems. I suppose I could have just shrugged, acknowledged it wasn’t right, and moved on. But I also became curious about what it takes to get a map fixed – a learning opportunity! So I went on a mission to find out how to fix it, but first I had to confirm my sanity by verifying that what I believed to be true was in fact, true.

The USGS conveniently also has historical maps online. This enabled me to go back to 1908, and also correlate to 1938 archival maps that had these streams identified. These maps, along with some city and county documents like land surveys of nearby properties, helped me confirm that I indeed was not crazy. All of these current online maps are wrong. The names were switched in comparison to historical records.

The first source I went to was Open Street Maps as it is community powered and allows someone to submit changes. Once I had an account, it enabled me to make notes on areas of the local map. To my surprise, an experienced OSM user responded shortly thereafter. They agreed with the evidence I presented. Something got switched, somewhere.

The mislabeled names appear in multiple places as the streams meander through the area, so a lot of changes. OSM became the first map to acknowledge and update the error, now documented in Changeset 143171846. A couple of people theorized it may have been part of a corrupted data import, though I don’t understand how it would switch two names in multiple places across the city. I smell human error.

Since Bing uses OSM as source data, I noted the change quickly appeared there. However, Apple, Google, ESRI ArcGIS, and USGS are all currently wrong. I sent email error reports to USGS and Apple, so it will be a test to see how long it takes for them to fix or acknowledge it. As far as the others, well, maybe I’ll be a good citizen and try to flag them as well, or just wait and see if these datasets are in any way “self-correcting.”

One of my favorite new apps in the Apple sphere is Freeform. It isn’t anything innovative – it is just a large whiteboard/notepad/mind map that can grow as large as you need it. I have been using it more to make notes and related screenshots of things I am working on. I started using it with this little rabbit hole to document the systems where I was seeing the error, as well as evidence where it was correct. Detective Lester Freamon might even give it a nod.²

Meanwhile, “Big Plumbrook” still appears under various names in these online maps, all missing the “Plumbrook” part. I don’t feel as strong a motivation to pursue correcting the name, but I might get a chuckle if I see “Big Plumbrook” show up someday. I did note some maps have incorrect boundaries, extending into the parcel owned by the hospital and not the city. So there are more tunnels to explore down there on a rainy day.

Provenance Eases the Tormented Mind

This is a pretty small thing with everything that is going on in the world today. While it became a momentary distraction, it was relatively easy to ultimately sleuth out the truth. But, nobody that I can tell has caught it, let alone bothered to do something about it until now. I have never researched the changelogs of any mapping systems to know how common or rare such a mistake is. I expect many experienced users of systems like OSM do this stuff as a hobby and see it every day.

I was a bit surprised to see how many maps have errors across different entities, suggesting a common dataset somewhere along the line. Naming is a minor thing, but we’ve all heard stories of a navigation system actually endangering someone following it blindly. The same goes for many other information sources in our lives today.

It reminds me of misinformation propagated with my photographs. Someone steals the photo, labels it with the wrong name – and suddenly it is all over the world with people thinking they can find a beach in Ontario or Yemen with colorful rocks. People speaking authoritatively that “they’ve been there, they’ve seen it.” It is pretty silly. But in this case, someone could actually pull up a map on their phone and say “See – it says this river is …” as if it is actual proof.

Being able to trace information back to some type of validated source is increasingly important, but not always easy. That’s why I believe provenance, with human and AI-generated information, will play a larger role in our lives as we are subjected to this kind of thing. It requires us to be a bit vigilant, maybe even do some detective work, before relying on the first things that pop up in an online search.

These drainage creeks are relied upon to mitigate excessive water that overwhelms the landscape. Many times, when their own capacity is exceeded, the landscape floods. Many of these drainage waterways were designed a hundred years ago and are inadequate for the climate we are heading into.³ I see a metaphor that relates to the deluge of information, data, and technology flowing at us today. Who knows what contaminants are in the runoff or are about to overwhelm us? If we are drinking from this water source, it would seem prudent to filter wisely.

1. City In Colour, “Things We Chose To Care About” ↩︎
2. The Wire’s Lester Freamon ↩︎
3. Planet Detroit “The Rains are Coming” ↩︎