The objective of this research was to develop a descriptive GIS model to identify potential nesting habitat of greater sandhill cranes in northwestern Minnesota. The modeling approach involved five fundamental steps: generating data layers, describing nest sites, testing for discrepancies between observed and expected distributions of nest sites, generating the model, and assessing the model. Results indicated that some crane pairs nested in sub-optimal and marginal areas despite the apparent availability of optimal habitat. The absence of nesting pairs in optimal habitat may be accounted for by conditions and assumptions inherent in the data and modeling approach, unanswered questions concerning the behavior of nesting cranes, the uncertainty that all nest sites in the study area were known, and the inability to model or detect certain pertinent landscape features and local variables