Environment

Invasives will be caught on screen for all to see

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By KEVIN DUFFY
Capital News Service
LANSING – Michigan researchers are building a time machine to fight freshwater invasive species. The project will let them navigate through a 150-year historical collection of plants and animals largely hidden among the storerooms of Great Lakes museums.
A $2.5 million federal grant will help move their collections from cupboards and shelves to a computer database through a process called digitization. Plant and animal specimens will be labeled and photographed for online access. A cooperative of 28 Great Lakes universities, including 11 in Michigan, will bypass the need for research staff to spend hours in a collection room pulling samples of North American fish, plants and mollusks. The project will allow online access to more than 1.7 million specimens, including 2,500 species, said Ken Cameron, who is leading the project and is director of the Wisconsin State Herbarium.

Environment

High tech studies Lake Huron shipwrecks

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By JULIANA MOXLEY
Capital News Service
LANSING — Diving isn’t the only way to get an in-depth look at the mysteries beneath the surface of the Great Lakes. Lasers, underwater robots and other innovative technologies are simplifying the discovery of and research about hundreds of shipwrecks at the bottom of the Great Lakes. Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a part of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is a 4,300-square-mile shipwreck sanctuary in northwestern Lake Huron near Alpena. It has one of America’s best-preserved and nationally significant collection of shipwrecks. There are 92 known wrecks in the newly expanded sanctuary, and four have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, said Sarah Waters, the education coordinator at the sanctuary.