Environment
Grants for stream monitoring total $50,000 in Michigan
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By QING ZHANG
Capital News Service
LANSING — The Michigan Clean Water Corps (MiCorps) will announce the winners of a new round of grants for volunteer stream monitoring projects by June. Three grants worth a total of $50,000 are available to survey aquatic macroinvertebrates and to inventory where roads cross streams.
“This year we received 10 applications for the stream grants. I expect about five or six of them will be funded,” said Paul Steen, the program manager for the network of volunteer monitoring projects. Such volunteer monitoring is common across the Great Lakes region, including such groups as the Wisconsin Water Action Volunteers, the Pennsylvania Alliance for Aquatic Resources Monitoring, the Minnesota Citizen Stream Monitoring Program, the Ohio Stream Quality Monitoring Program, Indiana’s Hoosier Riverwatch and Illinois RiverWatch. The Michigan Volunteer Stream Monitoring Program has received a similar amount to distribute from the Department of Environmental Quality for 11 years.