Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

Effective communication and shared decision-making may lead to better outcomes for sustainability science teams working on collaborative research. Communication affects project participants’ ongoing commitment to collaboration, their ability to combine different ideas and understand one another, and eventual project outcomes such as developing research methods, implementing new technologies, and enacting legislation. Those are the findings […]

Honors College seniors Audrey Cross and Ashley Thibeault are tracking every single food purchase made by UMaine Dining Services over a period of two months in the 2012-13 academic year. If this sounds meticulous, it’s because it is. The task involves combing through thousands of line items, noting every acquisition of every bit of dining hall […]

Last year, citizen scientists across the nation collected dragonfly larvae, which were tested for mercury levels. The final results could indicate risks for other species, including humans and the fish we eat Sarah Nelson, an associate research professor at UMaine’s Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions and the School of Forest Resources, was one […]

UMaine’s Tim Waring is a lead investigator on a newly funded initiative that seeks to better understand the common factors that underlie widely ranging studies in sustainability science. The aim is to find guiding principles that will help shape and expand the scope of research in the discipline. Waring, an Assistant Professor in the School […]

Few would have guessed cusk, an elusive fish that emerges from lobster traps with inside-out guts and bubbling skin, would become a focal point in the Gulf of Maine. The bottom dwellers have no commercial value; with their tough skin, they’re not even considered viable as bait. Still, a group of researchers, lobsterman and others […]

Conducting research aboard a lobster boat involves a lot more than research. “There’s a lot of really getting your hands dirty. I’ve spent a lot of time fishing with these guys,” said Jocelyn Runnebaum, a UMaine PhD student in Marine Biology, who spent the spring and summer collecting data on cusk in the Gulf of […]

The Mitchell Center Awards are designed to celebrate accomplishments of Mitchell Center (and SSI/NEST) team members and external stakeholders who have contributed to the values and principles at the heart of the Mitchell Center’s stakeholder-engaged, solutions-focused, interdisciplinary projects and partnerships. Congratulations to this year’s awardees: Outstanding Progress on “The Road to Solutions” Interdisciplinary Research Team […]

Evidence of pathogens in Maine’s wild turkey population, including a low pathology cancer-causing retrovirus found in a large percentage of birds, has been documented by researchers at the University of Maine Augusta (UMA) and the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (DIFW) The research team, which was part of the five-year Sustainability Solutions Initiative […]

Citizen science is a relatively new phenomenon in academia, a departure from long-held beliefs that only trained researchers can gather credible data. It’s changed things up. University researchers are quickly discovering that citizen volunteers make the impossible possible and tend not to break the budget. And citizen volunteers get a chance to participate in meaningful […]

With fecal bacterial contamination and naturally occurring Vibrio pathogens on the rise, there’s a lot working against the economic viability of Maine and New Hampshire’s shellfish flats. And the growing problem raises the specter of serious public health consequences. In an effort to manage the threat, the states of Maine and New Hampshire close thousands […]