EMPIRE -- Summer projects at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore will light the way for visitors to South Manitou Island Lighthouse and help protect the park's namesake dunes.
About 20 park personnel and Nature Conservancy workers will spend several weeks this summer rooting out the invasive baby's breath plant from sand dunes in the park as part of the National Park Service Centennial Initiative, a 10-year program to spruce up national parks for the Service's 2016 birthday.
Area agencies matched nearly $100,000 appropriated through the initiative to fund weed eradication, as well as pay for a project to restore the beacon and lantern room at South Manitou Island Lighthouse.
"There are 56 parks in our region and only 11 projects were awarded and Sleeping Bear got two of them," said Tom Ulrich, Sleeping Bear's assistant superintendent. "In addition to these centennial projects ... one of the efforts is to restore the seasonal employees whose positions have been lost over the last several years."
Baby's breath, a hardy, deep-rooted annual flower, has infested more than 1,300 acres of active dunes in the Lakeshore and negatively impacted the native community, including the habitat for the endangered piping plover shore bird and threatened Pitcher's thistle plant, park biologist Ken Hyde said.
Park crews will work with the Nature Conservancy, which donated nearly $50,000 to the project, for about three months this summer to root out the plant on dunes along Lake Michigan.
"There is just a whole series of rare and unique plants that grow in the sand dunes and this just shades them out or out-competes them," Hyde said, adding that park biologists also plan to hold public workshops on baby's breath in September.
On South Manitou Island, the park teamed with the Manitou Islands Memorial Society, Manitou Island Transit and Electro-Optics Technology, Inc. to install a replica third-order Fresnel lens and solar-powered bulb at the lighthouse.
Officials hope to have the beacon operational by mid- to late-summer, ending five decades of darkness, said Mike Grosvenor, who operates the Manitou Island Transit.
"Our incentive is simply because it's a lighthouse we think it is important it has a light. We are taking the extra step to making it a replica Fresnel lens," Grosvenor said of the $93,000 project. "In interpreting the history there with the kids ... the Fresnel lens ties into that very closely."
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