PELLSTON—On a hot late summer day, University of Michigan student Mira Hughes wades through the water of Elliot Creek, a clear, cold stream that flows through the southeast side of Cheboygan State Park.

She scoops insects out of the pebbles, sand and muck that line different parts of the creek. She takes water samples of the small stream, checks its flow rate and notes its temperature. She is collecting data on Elliott Creek to help the environmental nonprofit Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council assess the environmental health of the Lake Huron Watershed.

Hughes is the 2025 CLEAR Fellow. CLEAR stands for Community and Lakes Environmental Awareness and Research. The fellowship was founded and funded by graduates of the U-M Biological Station who hoped to give to the next generation of environmental scientists training at the university the same kind of hands-on experience they had themselves at the biological station.

As part of the fellowship, Hughes interns with the watershed council, based in Petoskey. Each summer since 2014, CLEAR fellows have conducted research and public outreach through the watershed council while living and taking classes at the biological station. The program has graduated 11 fellows, most of whom go on to careers in the environment.

Now a senior, Hughes is seeking dual degrees from the Program in the Environment, part of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design.

“Water is the foundation of life in a lot of ways. I feel like most people know and understand that. But we need to care about our waters. Otherwise, down the line, it will be very hard to access the fresh water that we have today,” Hughes said. “I care very deeply that water is a human right.”

Project CLEAR

Hughes’ fellowship has its roots in Project CLEAR, which was started in 1977 by U-M graduate students at UMBS. Their goal was to build ties between the biological station, community members, lake associations and local governments who all were interested in protecting northern Michigan’s water.

At the time, the U.S. National Science Foundation was funding initiatives aimed at restoring areas that were already polluted, said Arthur Gold, a U-M alum of the biological station. Gold conceived of Project CLEAR and led a group of nine students to implement it.

“Here was this incredible area where the water was clean, and yet everyone knew that highways were being built, and there were going to be a lot more people here,” he said. “Was this going to be another example of clean water getting degraded?”

Gold and his fellow students learned what people were already doing to protect their inland lakes, such as planting shoreline buffers to slow down water runoff from their yards, keeping contaminants such as fertilizers from reaching the lake. In midsummer, the U-M students held an inland lakes expo showing people how to check water samples for pollutants and maintain their septic tanks to keep contamination from creeping into the lakes.

Project CLEAR eventually grew into the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council. Over its almost 50 years, the council has assisted in dam removal, restoring natural stream flow and reconnecting coldwater habitat for brook trout. The council has led rain garden installations, stormwater improvements and watershed management planning across northern Michigan. It has trained hundreds of volunteers to collect water quality data used in state and local watershed management, and has developed the Watershed Academy, which connects northern Michigan students directly to local streams and lakes through hands-on monitoring and field work.

Of the nine original CLEAR students, seven went on to have environmental careers, said Linda Greer, emeritus senior scientist at the National Resources Defense Council and UMBS alumna who was one of the project’s original members.

Greer earned a doctorate in environmental toxicology and spent her career at the NRDC fighting pollution and waste from industrial manufacturing in the U.S. and abroad. She credits the experience she gained through her five summers at the biological station.

“We thought it would be great for one or two students at a time to work at Tip of the Mitt, while living here at the biological station, to have the opportunity to serve as that flywheel in the operation between science and applied problems, hopefully giving them the same sense of inspiration and purpose that we developed to go into this field themselves,” she said.

Hands-on research, hands-on experience

Part of Hughes’ work this summer was to collect data on creeks like this to monitor their overall health. CLEAR fellows take on independent research during the fellowship. She chose to study chloride, or salt, contamination in different areas of northern Michigan’s watershed. Chloride contamination in water often results from efforts to de-ice roads in the winter.

Many of the roads in northern Michigan, Hughes points out, circle the perimeter of many of the region’s lakes. So she built an interactive web-based map showing where water runoff occurred. She also researched how the region has changed over the past 20 years with more paved roads and newly built buildings with parking lots that don’t allow rain to soak through the ground, which can help filter out contamination.

“In the winters when we’re applying salt to our roads, the main issue with that is we often use an excessive amount of salt. Some days, we’ll apply it even though there’s very little chance of snow,” Hughes said. “Then, it will get washed away and straight into whatever stream or lake is nearby, or into the groundwater.”

Hughes’ time at the biological station and Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council has strengthened her confidence in her work as a young scientist. During her freshman year at U-M, Hughes focused on taking art classes. The science classes, she said, intimidated her. But she took a general ecology lab and lecture class at the biological station in 2024, which dispelled any anxiety she held about her abilities.

“That’s always been my mission: How can I do both science and art, or have some sort of intersection of those things together in school. But I was a little nervous to take the science classes at U-M,” Hughes said. “When I went to the biological station in Pellston last summer, I really realized that I love ecology, I love being outdoors, I love doing fieldwork.”

While she does fieldwork for Tip of the Mitt, she sketches what she sees, a way to help her learn about the environment in which she works. She plans to pursue a career in environmental research, and says the fellowship has solidified the feeling that environmental work is more important now than ever, especially that which focuses on local and state-level change.

“When I’m out in the field, I like doing a lot of field sketches. I like drawing whatever I’m studying. I draw plants, I draw animals, I draw trees, and that helps me learn about them and really cement it in my brain,” Hughes said. “The internship at Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council has been such an incredible experience. I feel like every day, I’m learning something new.”