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A team of six master’s students led by Lecturer and Project Advisor Sheila Schueller from the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) released the first-ever site stewardship and management plan for the U-M-owned St. Pierre Wetland property. This document will serve as the blueprint to create similar stewardship plans for five additional SEAS-managed properties, encompassing over 1,700 acres of land. 

The wetland exists along the northern shore of Bass Lake in Hamburg Township, Michigan, as a rare and threatened ecosystem that provides habitat for plants and animals and free ecological services to the surrounding communities, such as storing water, mitigating flooding and filtering runoff during rain events. However, over the previous three decades, the site has become overrun by invasive plants, which threaten the healthy functioning of the system. Finalizing the stewardship plan, which was the outcome of this group’s SEAS master’s capstone project, comes as the site celebrates its 50th anniversary since the donation of the site to U-M in 1975 by the neighboring St. Pierre family. 

"The students recognized the need to center their comprehensive site stewardship plan on community engagement,” said Schueller. “While the property is not open to the public, university partnerships with neighbors and area practitioners will be key to revitalizing the research and education activity that will support the health of this wetland.”

According to the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, “only 30 percent of the original wetlands remain in the Great Lakes Basin.” This precipitous decline in total wetland area, coupled with continued extreme and heavy rain events, calls for the protection of vitally important sites like the St. Pierre Wetland. 

Inspired by a site assessment by the Huron River Watershed Council, two consecutive SEAS master’s project teams (2022-23 and 2024-25) have dedicated their efforts to understanding the site to determine what steps need to be taken to rehabilitate the St. Pierre Wetland. In the process, they gained extensive interdisciplinary training in hands-on restoration and community engagement. 

Over 16 months, this year's SEAS master’s project team visited the site over 40 times and spent hundreds of hours interacting with the wetland. They conducted an initial site assessment, continued experiments using non-chemical methods to remove invasive plants, began to study landscape alterations that have changed the way water moves across and is stored within the system and engaged both the university and other partners to significantly increase interest and action at the site. 

As a result, the project team developed three strategic priorities for the St. Pierre Wetland:

1. Implement adaptive management to restore and maintain the site’s health and educational value.
2. Continue and expand relevant site research and education through formal and informal research, course projects, work days and field-based labs.
3. Build capacity and processes to support long-term value, stewardship, research and education.

Local residents have commented about the dramatic changes they have noticed at the wetland over the last few decades. 

“I spent time kayaking through the site a few days after a big storm in July 2024,” said Jason Krick, a SEAS graduate student who is one of the members of the master’s project team. “One resident commented that the water level in Bass Lake [from that storm] was the highest he had ever seen.”  

Krick says he heard from other residents about changes in the species on the site over time. “Eric St. Pierre, the grandson of the original donors, told me he used to be able to look into the wetland and see a ‘beautiful [wet] meadow that’s now all covered in buckthorn,’ an aggressive shrub that currently dominates the site, and that he remembers seeing many more snakes, turtles and frogs in the area than he does now.”

The project team hopes that some of the non-chemical management plans they are developing for invasive species could be leveraged by residents struggling with the same problems in their backyards. 

“The SEAS property is a great real-world laboratory, and our findings can be applied more broadly in other similar landscapes,” said Molly Russell, another SEAS graduate student and project team member. 

Schueller adds, “Restoration work is multi-faceted, long-term and leaves a positive legacy on the landscape. There are many opportunities to learn from and contribute to this wetland over time.”

For more detailed information about the stewardship plan, visit the St. Pierre Wetland Stewardship Plan: A Model for SEAS Properties Planning. To explore the genesis of the wetland revitalization and the foundational work on this project, visit an Informed and Community-Engaged Restoration of St. Pierre Wetland. To learn more about how healthy wetlands contribute to healthy communities, or to get involved and help restore this community asset, please contact [email protected].