The Wrack

I watch a lot of nature films. My favorite bit of animal cinema involves day-old ducklings emerging from a hole in a tree trunk and plummeting 50 feet down to the leaf-strewn ground below. Their mother guides them to a nearby lake. Their real lives begin.

Three angles of investigation into three waterways flowing through three municipalities have reached one encouraging conclusion: The Merriland River, Branch Brook, and the Little River are ecologically healthy and the people largely responsible, those living in the combined watershed, know and appreciate it.

The design for our Sustaining Coastal Landscapes and Community Benefits project, the first study of its kind, drew from the sciences of ecology, economy, and communications. Reserve staff and their colleagues from Clark University looked at streamside buffers in Sanford, Kennebunk, and Wells to find out how they affect life in the water and how members of the community value them.

Last week, UMaine Ph.D. candidate Jared Homola and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Krista Capps visited three vernal pools at the reserve as part of Jared's research into how urbanization affects vernal pools and influences the organisms within them. He is especially interested in how abrupt climate change can impact the persistence of ecologically important species and the genetic basis for the ecosystem services they provide.

 

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 12/15/13  (and may also appear, with other goodies, in members' mailboxes shortly...):

Normally, I do not talk to dead opossums. But since I’d watched this one keel over right in front of me, I felt I had to say something.

Project Goals

• Understand and measure the value of services and benefits provided by waterfront buffer lands and wetlands
• Provide place-based economic information to support decisions that reflect the true consequences of land use, restoration, and conservation practices in southern Maine

Project Summary

Along the coast of southern Maine, the need to conserve natural buffers to protect rivers and wetlands has become a focal point for tensions between development and conservation interests. In this rapidly developing landscape, decision-makers often feel they must choose development over conservation or restoration to support local economies. While there is scientific evidence that underscores the value of protecting natural buffers around sensitive water bodies, local decision-makers need additional, place-based, economic information about the ecosystem services that these lands provide and the range of tradeoffs that are implied in related land use decisions. A team led by the Wells Reserve addressed this need by working with local, state, and federal stakeholders to better understand, measure, and communicate how southern Mainers value natural buffers and the tradeoffs they are willing to make to protect these critical resources for the future.

At the Reserve's Earth Day Celebration, the Kittery Trading Post Outdoor Academy allowed visitors to input their living styles into a computer program that would then give them their "ecological footprint." An ecological footprint is the amount of land and water a person uses to support his or her daily lifestyle. This includes what types of food a person eats, vehicle gas consumption, and size of his or her house…