The Great Salt Lake is the largest saline lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth largest in the world. The 15,000 square miles of various water environments, remote islands and shorelines, with 400,000 acres of wetlands, provide habitat for plants, brine shrimp, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, shorebirds and waterfowl. Birds rely on the lake, a critical link in the Pacific Flyway between North and South America. Every year 10 million birds from 338 different species come to rest, eat and breed during migrations of a thousand miles or more. With the decline of other lakes, GSL is increasingly important to these species.