Thunder Bay Junior High - Lake Huron Adopt-a-Beach - NE Michigan Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative

Adopt-a-Beach™ is the Alliance for the Great Lakes’ premier volunteer program, with some 10,000 annual participants ranging from individuals and families to schools and businesses. Information collected by the teams is entered into the Adopt-a-Beach™ online system and is used to educate the public, share with local beach authorities and improve our beaches.

To find out how much litter these students have collected, please visit the Adopt-a-Beach Historical Data Site and search for Alpena County.

A few tips for getting started, from Cheryl Mack, 6th grade teacher - TBJH:

Go to www.greatlakesadopt.org
Choose the "Create an Account" tab
Once you've created your account you can find the "adoptable" beaches in your area.
Try searching first with just the state and county fields filled in. That will show you the registered beaches in your area. For Alpena, some beaches were listed just under Alpena County, and I couldn't find them if I searched Alpena as a city.
If you know of a beach that is not listed, the Alliance will add it for you. They did that for one of our beaches-Thomson or Blair Street wasn't on their database.

Also on that page you will find forms for the beach clean-up days. Don't get overwhelmed with the paperwork. It's really not that much and the Alliance sends you most things that you will need.

In order to be a Team Leader, you will have to do a short webinar that has the collections protocols. All teachers on my team were able to collect data with their students without a huge science background. It's pretty straightforward. There are also quick YouTube videos about the collection protocols. I showed them to my teaching colleagues and my students prior to the trip.

Working with local partners like NOAA Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, Michigan Sea Grant, Huron Pines, and the NE MI GLSI, we have adopted the beaches in Alpena, along a 1 ½ mile stretch of US 23, including Bayview Park, Thompson Park, Blair Street Pier, Starlite Beach and Mich-e-ke-wis. Students split into five groups, according to their science class, and each class will be assigned a beach.

Supported through NOAA B-WET programming, this research project aims to gather water quality data along coastal Lake Huron sites within the City of Alpena.