The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) Action Plan calls for strategic ecosystem restoration that addresses the biggest threats to the Great Lakes and accelerated progress toward long-term lake management goals. The Action Plan lays out a six-step science-based adaptive management cycle to prioritize ecosystem problems, select projects to address those problems, and assess the effectiveness of the projects that are funded to help improve subsequent decision making. The prioritization of ecosystem problems should enable GLRI decision makers to select a suite of projects that will make the greatest gains toward annualized measures of progress and ecosystem health by targeting activities toward strategic geographies. However, an explicit rationale for selection of strategic geographies has yet to be articulated or demonstrated. The current project proposes to develop, justify, and demonstrate a rationale for spatial decision making relative to non-point-source pollution under GLRI Focus Area 3.