Michigan Environment Watch

Take an underwater journey as researchers deploy sonar technology to map the lakebed to document organisms that call it home. The goal is to provide data to fishery and hatchery managers and those tracking the spread of invasive species.

The Wednesday announcement marks an unusual use of a regulatory process normally used to speed responses to disasters like dam breaks and pipeline leaks. Environmentalists decried the move.

UP lawmakers say the gas plants should be deemed acceptable under Michigan’s clean energy law, saying Yoopers would see energy bills spike if they are shut down prematurely. Environmentalists argue the bills are premature and unnecessary.

Climate change is making it easier for Great Lakes waterbirds to get sick, according to a recent study.

The Trump administration has reversed a purge of federal workers tasked with combatting one of the Great Lakes’ most damaging invasive species. But a month-plus delay in starting treatments may have consequences.

The Trump administration disinvited two Canadian mayors from a Great Lakes event in Washington and the president has mentioned “revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations.”

Some call it the best walleye fishing in the world when a portion of Lake Erie’s walleye head north during spawning season.

Michigan stood to receive hundreds of millions from a federal financing network that the Trump administration wants to abolish amid claims of a ‘far-left’ conspiracy. Michigan's plans for the money included insulating old homes and building apartments.

The tribes are concerned with an anticipated fast-tracking of the tunnel permit. The Army Corps of Engineers says it will consider comments from tribes as it prepares an environmental impact statement.

Agricultural runoff, less wintertime ice cover and strong storms that deposit nutrients into the lake are other possible reasons for a surge in cyanobacterial blooms.

To aid in restoration across the state, the Michigan Wild Rice Initiative, comprising tribes indigenous to the Great Lakes region, state officials, and academic experts, created a stewardship plan.

When PFAS began showing up in Cadillac residents’ well water, industrial polluters were a prime suspect. But state investigators say residents may have unwittingly tainted their own water, through years of flushing common products into household septic systems. It’s a risk facing millions of Michiganders.

The weeks-old cubs were spotted without their mother in Ontonagon County. State officials are celebrating the discovery, while cautioning that they don’t know whether the cubs survived.

The Michigan Natural Resources Commission could vote as soon as next month on the proposed hunting expansion, which comes just a year after commissioners restricted springtime hunting to avoid orphaning newborns that depend upon their parents for survival.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the flurry of directives the ‘most consequential day of deregulation in American history.’ Michigan environmentalists agree — but they don’t think it’s a good thing.

A new study says the Great Lakes started forming as many as 300 million years ago.

A study tallying 20 years worth of population figures for more than 500 butterfly species found that, on average, populations have declined by 22% since the turn of the millennium. Researchers called it 'a wake-up call.'

Bipartisan lawmakers want to incentivize nuclear energy research and development in Michigan, arguing investments would make the state ‘ground zero’ for the industry’s growth. But opponents fear high costs and environmental drawbacks.

A new air quality permit for the Copperwood mine in Gogebic County requires additional testing for mine vents and emissions and places limits on emergency generators that run on natural gas and emit formaldehyde.

Scientists in an Ann Arbor research office were among hundreds fired nationally as the Trump administration slashes staff within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.