Michigan is facing immense environmental destruction caused by invasive species, hurting everything from crop production to the places people fish and swim.

But last year, the statewide program that battles invasives was hit with significant budget slashes by the state legislature.

Now, the people who work to save Michigan’s land and waterways from invasive species are grappling with a new reality: how to mitigate the damage from an unbeatable enemy with fewer resources.

Surveying for invasives

On a cold, misty afternoon in early April, Stephanie Day surveyed a park in Grand Ledge for a relatively new invasive plant campaigning through the Midwest: lesser celandine.

Day is the Mid-Michigan Invasive Species Coordinator and organizes action across Ingham, Ionia, Clinton and Eaton counties.

At the beginning of spring, a brown forest is a sign of a healthy one. But along Fitzgerald Park’s muddy trails, in patches on the side of hills and near the Grand River, green speckled the landscape.

That’s not a good thing.

That pop of color is a sign of invasive plants like European frog-bit, autumn olive, honeysuckle, Japanese barberry and lesser celandine.

“You get used to that specific shade of green,” Day said to Eaton County Parks Director Ethan Jacobs, who joined the hiking survey. Day gestured to a patch of lesser celandine climbing up the side of a hill.

“Yeah, a slightly lighter green,” Jacobs replied, laughing. “It’s the stuff of nightmares.”

Further into the woods, Day – armed with a spike tool – squatted down to dig out what she suspected was a lesser celandine plant along a trail. Its bulbous roots confirmed her suspicions.

“They’re heart shaped, and they have a couple different colors of green, which not very many plants have,” Day said, holding up the plant’s leaf between her index and thumb.

It may sound pretty, but lesser celandine is a danger to the states’ ecosystems.

It – along with other invasive plants – bloom earlier than native ones, sucking up nutrients in the soil. They crowd the ground space, which leaves little resources for the native wildflowers to grow.

Absent wildflowers hurt more than just the park’s beauty.

“That’s really the bottom of the food chain, right? It impacts everything above, so the birds that feed on the insects that are pollinating these plants, it’s all connected,” Day said.

The local ecosystem is a tapestry of complex and sensitive relationships. For instance, the native spring beauty mining bee only feeds on the spring beauty flower. If the flowers go, so do the bees. Without native pollinators, other plants are harmed, in turn affecting the animals that rely on them.

Jacobs stopped on the hike, pointing out a thorny, invasive shrub called Japanese barberry.

“Ticks really like Japanese barberry,” he said. “If you’ve got a lot of Japanese barberry, you’re probably going to see more ticks in the area.”

Further along, Jacobs saw one of these shrubs jutting diagonally out of a steep hill a few yards below the trail – its presence seems to haunt him.

“This is the Japanese barberry that drives me insane,” he said. “There’s no effective way to get down there. We’ve treated this area the past three springs, but I don’t get how it ever even got established there in the first place.”

These plants are just a few of the more than thirty species on the state’s priority watchlist, meaning it’s not everywhere yet but it’s still causing harm. Dozens of more invasive plants and animals are already established.

How funding cuts hurt the environment

Invasive species kill native trees, fish, crops and more. Even recreation is impacted, like invasive aquatic plants blocking swimming holes or clogging boat motors.

But last year, state legislators cut funding towards the statewide invasive species program for the first time since it was founded more than a decade ago.

Joanne Foreman has worked for the program since its beginning. She says the cuts are coming out of the grants that go to local communities and organizations, which means less ammunition to fight invasives.

“We had around 80 applications, and to really only be able to fund less than 50% of them was hard,” Foreman said.

The state legislature awarded the grant program two thirds of what they received the previous year.

In Mid-Michigan, Day applied for a grant to fund lesser celandine treatment at the Portland State Game Area for the third year in a row, but she did not receive the money.

She did, however, receive an $8,000 grant to hire a seasonal field technician this summer and complete watchlist species surveys across her four-county coverage area.

The year before, Day was awarded $15,000.

Even if funding is reinstated in the next budget cycle, Foreman said these cuts will have long-term consequences for the ecosystem. Any kind of pause in managing the spread of an invasive could mean reaching a point of no return

“They move faster than we do, unfortunately,” Foreman said. “So, then you might have lost the ability to contain an infestation, or to reach a point where you could eradicate that infestation.”

The Michigan Invasive Species Program is also having to hit pause on partnerships.

That means fewer universities researching how to better fight invasives, reduced training programs for volunteer groups and fewer collaborations with organizations like Trout Unlimited.

“You can’t just hit the ground running again,” Foreman said. “You might have partners that have turned their attention to other work or simply not been able to sustain what they were doing and had to walk away from it entirely.”

But Foreman said because invasives aren’t stopping, she and others won’t let up their fight against them.

This story originally aired on WKAR.

Activists in Ypsilanti Township keep fighting to halt a data center development associated with nuclear weapons research.

Stop the Data Center members gathered following an anonymous tip about a potential groundbreaking ceremony in South Hydro Park in Ypsi Township. So far, construction details for the $1.2 billion data center have been kept under wraps by University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory officials. 

Elizabeth Jordan is a spokesperson with Stop the Data Center. She says the facility will have several buildings, including one for nuclear weapons research that will need so much energy that a new DTE substation will need to be built on location. 

“One of the buildings will account for 10% of the energy, serving as a small data center for University of Michigan to lease, while the remaining 90% will power a much larger, top-secret military data center authorized for Los Alamos to conduct nuclear weapons research,” says Jordan.

Local officials are also against the data center’s construction in Ypsilanti Township. Jordan says the political influence of the University of Michigan could move the project forward despite existing zoning restrictions and widespread local opposition. 

Jordan says Stop the Data will continue to monitor the site closely, and host monthly public meetings. 

“[Stop the Data Center] is on Instagram…we also have big monthly meetings. The next one is May 9 at 2 p.m… it’s in North Hydro Park, right across the river,” Jordan says. 

One of two public campgrounds in Wayne County is reopening this summer after extensive renovations.

Located in Lower Huron Metropark, the Walnut Grove Campground features 15 ADA-accessible campsites and connects to the Iron Belle Trail, Huron River Water Trail and the rest of the 13-park, 25,000 acre Huron-Clinton Metroparks system.

While camping outdoors requires some equipment and knowledge, those resources are within reach, and the new campground is more accessible than ever, says Amy McMillan, CEO of Huron-Clinton Metroparks.

“One of the great things about these improvements is we have barrier-free camping now, if you have mobility issues or have a stroller you need to push around, it’s absolutely perfect for that.”

A number of education and community events are available for camp-curious metro Detroiters, including a Family Campout Night on July 24-25, and weekend programs for first-time campers to try out equipment for the first time.

“You kind of get that up north feeling being right here next to Belleville,” says McMillan.

You can reserve campsites online, with dates open early May through Mid-October.

Guests:

• Amy McMillan is the CEO of the Huron-Clinton Metroparks.
• Holly Clegg is the Park Operations Manager at Lower Huron Metropark.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

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More stories from The Metro

The U.S. Forest Service is shutting down all four of its research centers in Michigan as part of a nationwide reorganization, sparking concerns about the future health of forests in the Great Lakes.

According to environmental advocates, the closure could increase problems like invasive pests and diseases, as well as harm wildlife, outdoor recreation, and forest biomes. 

Emma Shedd is with the Sierra Club’s Michigan Chapter. She says the importance of these research centers cannot be ignored.

“It is a big deal….there are a lot of impacts that we can expect to see [like layoffs and loss of skilled research staff]…we can [also] expect to see a much weaker agency, and that trickles down to a lack of regional research to support our forests here [in Michigan].” 

Researchers with the U.S. Forest Service study forest health, monitor invasive species, and collect long-term data that help both federal and state agencies make decisions. Shedd says this includes a nationwide program which guides actions about logging, wildlife habitats, water quality, and outdoor activities.

Without these facilities, she says, a lot of that work could be reduced or lost. 

Shedd says, “Forest management is a long term game…we’ve got rotations of 60 to 80 to 100 years going on in our forest, and so having a lack of management now…has effects that span whole lifetimes.” 

She says Michigan residents who oppose the drastic cuts to the U.S. Forest Service should call their representatives. “This is something that we really need to push back on for… the health of our forests in the long term,” Shedd says.

This story is a part of WDET’s ongoing series, the Detroit Tree Canopy Project.

House Republicans want to eliminate Michigan’s clean energy law requiring 100% renewable power by 2040.

A second bill would also limit distributed energy sources, such as rooftop solar, to just 1% of a utility’s total energy sales. Democrats say that amounts to a ban on community solar programs like Ann Arbor’s Solarize, where neighbors group together to buy solar panels at bulk discounts.

Ann Arbor solar installations jumped from 17 per year to 180 after the Solarize program launched. The 1% cap could hurt that growth.

Republican Rep. Pauline Wendzel says her bill puts “reliability and affordability first.” 

On the other side of the aisle, Democratic Rep. Tonya Myers Phillips points to utilities and their frequent rate increases as the problem behind high energy bills.

Reporter Kyle Davidson from Michigan Advance joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss the battle over energy costs.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.

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In 2019, Michigan’s largest utility ended what’s called net metering. That meant if you had solar panels, you no longer got full credit for the extra energy you sent back to the grid. So, instead of getting a dollar’s worth of credit, you might get 30 cents.

But in Ann Arbor, this didn’t slow down rooftop solar, or make it less attractive financially. Solar installations exploded there —from 17 per year before 2019 to 180 per year since 2020.

This is partly because of a program called Solarize — neighbors banding together to get group discounts on solar installations. Now it has spread across metro Detroit.

Julie Roth launched Solarize. Today, she’s the energy manager at the city of Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovations. She spoke with The Metro‘s Robyn Vincent.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.

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More stories from The Metro

Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield recently appointed Ali Abazeed as the city’s new Chief Public Health Officer, saying he would be a part of creating a “health in all policies” approach to government.

“We’re really excited to get up and going and also to continue the good work that the department has done over the years, but also to upgrade the software of what public health can look like in the city of Detroit,” he shares. 

Abazeed previously created and led the city of Dearborn’s health department. He also worked as a public health advisor at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

Past policies shape today’s health issues

He says health is impacted by housing quality and environment. He hopes to work with the department’s staff of 280 people to create better health outcomes for Detroiters.

“The challenges that Detroit faces from a health perspective, those aren’t inevitable…  they’re created by decades, if not centuries of decisions made by man, policies that have been excluding people from opportunities,” he says.

Abazeed says the city focuses on a harm reduction approach by working with all city departments to connect the dots for people who live in the city. He says part of that will include having more health department officials out in the city.

“90% of your life expectancy happens in the communities where you live, learn, work, worship, play…  then it requires us to take that 90% collaborative approach across everything that we do at the city,” he says. 

Abazeed says Detroiters face health burdens like asthma, which he says require a multifaceted response. 

He says everyone is entitled to good health. 

“Understanding who has been disqualified, who has been sort of pushed to the side, and whether that’s… in Washington or Dearborn and now in Detroit, I think the work is relatively the same, even if it does take on a little bit of a different scale,” he says. 

Last October, Ground Services at Wayne State University discovered an infestation of bark beetles on trees in Gullen Mall. 

Donna Reincke, Associate Director of Grounds for Wayne State University, explains how these tiny insects caused great harm. 

“They burrow into the tree trunks and leave these tiny little holes, maybe about the size of a pencil eraser. With that, the insect infestation introduced a fungus [blue stain fungus] into the tree, which stopped the tree from being able to take up water, and killed a couple of the trees.”

The fungus spread to surrounding trees and left them too damaged to save.

Reincke says sadly, they had to remove 11 pine trees in Gullen Mall, as dead trees pose a major safety risk.

“We do remove them to avoid any accidents from happening, and it’s just a safety issue with the risk of it falling, and dead branches falling down,” explains Reincke. 

Expanding campus tree canopy

With the help of many volunteers from The Greening of Detroit and Wayne State University’s Office of Sustainability, Reincke is happy to share that they replanted 30 trees in the same area. 

Reincke says, “even though the trees are smaller than the ones that were removed, we wanted to make sure we still did right by planting trees that could fill in the canopy, and it was a really fun, successful event.”

In addition to Gullen Mall, Reincke stated they planted 71 trees at Wayne State University’s athletic complex, on the corner of Warren Avenue and Trumbull Street. 

Over these two spaces, they planted Hackberry, Kentucky Coffee ‘Decaf’, Bald Cypress, ‘Autumn Splendor’ Buckeye, Allegheny Serviceberry, London Plane, Blackgum, Tulip Tree, Basswood, Accolade Cherry, and Swamp White Oak. 

Wayne State University’s Ground Services and Office of Sustainability are partnering up again to host a tree planting event for Arbor Day, April 24th, 2026.

For more details, visit Wayne State University’s Get Involved page.