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 less 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.
