Grants for stream monitoring total $50,000 in Michigan

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.

Michigan’s community colleges recruited 2,780 international students

By QING ZHANG
Capital News Service
LANSING — A low admission threshold and low costs at community colleges can benefit international students who lack English language proficiency or find tuition at four-year institutions too expensive, experts say. There were 2,780 international students enrolled in Michigan’s 28 community colleges in fall 2013. That’s roughly 1.3 percent of the student population at these colleges, according to the president of the Michigan Community College Association, Michael Hansen.
Diana Schack, an international student advisor at Oakland Community College, said, “We require a really low score” in language proficiency for prospective international students. They only need to get 3 on IELTS (the maximum score is 9) or 25 on the Internet-based TOEFL (the maximum score is 120). IELTS is the International English Language Testing System, and TOEFL stands for Test of English as a Foreign Language.

Michigan National Guard tests novel wind funnels

By QING ZHANG
Capital News Service
LANSING –The Michigan National Guard is spending $1.5 million on two new machines to generate electricity from wind at Camp Grayling near Grayling and the Fort Custer Training Center near Battle Creek. Unlike traditional windmills, the system captures wind from all directions, concentrating and accelerating it before sending it through a turbine on the ground, according to its designer, Sheerwind Co. The Minnesota-based company calls the design INVELOX, which stands for INcreased VELocity. Sheerwind says the system generates six times more electrical energy than conventional wind turbines and can work at wind speeds as low as 2 mph. And it’s cheaper to build and operate.

MSU students watch Hong Kong protest with eye on future

By QING ZHANG
Capital News Service
LANSING – Vicky Lee, a sophomore in human development and family studies at Michigan State University, had slept less than four hours in three days. “Every time I am going to sleep, there is something big that happened there,” she said of the current protests in Hong Kong against the Chinese government concerning the procedure for electing the region’s chief executive. She is one of about three dozen students from Hong Kong at MSU, according to its Office for International Students and Scholars. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress has decided that Hong Kong residents can elect their chief executive from a field of two to three candidates in 2017. Before that election, however, candidates must get more than half the votes of a nomination committee.

Congress expands Great Lakes projects, 14 projects planned for Michigan

By Qing Zhang
Capital News Service
LANSING — Everybody knows water flows, but not many people know that the sediment below it does too. That’s why harbors need dredging, or excavating the gradually accumulated material on the bottom and transporting it elsewhere. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Detroit District planned eight dredging projects in Michigan and Wisconsin for 2014 at a cost of $13.2 million. But Congress recently allocated an additional $17.8 million. That allows the district to include eight new projects and increase funding for four of the original projects.

Beach closings down but pollution still murky

By QING ZHANG
Capital News Service
LANSING – The number of closings or health safety advisories due to pollution at Michigan’s more than 1,200 public and nearly 500 private beaches has dropped the past three years. “Surface water quality is generally showing improvement where programs are in place to correct problems and restore water quality,” according to the 2014 Integrated Report for Water Quality and Pollution Control in Michigan by the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. But taking the long view, parts of the state’s coastal environment may not be as promising as they appear. “All our nearshore waters are at risk,” said Joan Rose, the director of the Water Quality and Environmental Microbiology Laboratory at Michigan State University. “No surprise, in urban areas things are more serious.”
Rose’s lab has studied cores of sediments from the bottom of Lake St.

It’s official: Michigan throws out less stuff

By QING ZHANG
Capital News Service
LANSING — Despite a slight increase in Michigan’s population, solid waste generated in the state in 2013 declined 0.5 percent, continuing a 10-year trend, according to a report by the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). And the state still has almost three decades’ worth of landfill capacity, the report said. Waste imported from other states and Canada increased by more than 8 percent. Canada is the largest source of imported trash, accounting for about 17 percent of the total waste landfilled in Michigan last year, according to the report. “Compared with residential waste, we are receiving more commercial and industrial waste from our neighbor,” said Brad Wurfel, communications director for DEQ, and that may signify increased economic activities.