Just a heads up that the Echo crew has implemented a few features you can use to help us make the site even better.

Notice that at the bottom of “Catch of the Day” we’ve created a link for you to suggest something for that feature. It can simply be something relevant to the Great Lakes environment that you’ve stumbled across and thought that perhaps we’d want to highlight or comment upon.

We’ve established a similar link under “Great Links” where you can flag news stories and URLs that we can consider for inclusion. Each day we strive for 10 Great Links that are diverse in subject and in geographic location. Heaven knows there is enough material out there that we can’t see it all. We appreciate your help.

You can get a sense of the richness of stories we archive and categorize in the link to more Great Links.

Finally, you may have noticed guest columns on this week’s Echo. We welcome such contributions and have developed a system for considering them and tips on how best to write for us. You can find that here.

As always, we appreciate your comments on news stories and posts as they so often augment Echo reports.  Thanks for helping us with this experiment in creating an environmental news community defined as a watershed.

Great Lakes Echo editor David Poulson is the associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.