Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

The Sustainability Solutions Initiative’s (SSI) Alternative Futures Team has released the Maine Futures Community Mapper (MFCM), an online tool that allows town planners, conservationists, developers, and the general public to visualize what the landscape in their area may look like under various future scenarios. Support for the project was provided through a National Science Foundation […]

Spencer Meyer, a Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI) doctoral candidate in UMaine’s School of Forest Resources, along with faculty advisors Rob Lilieholm and Chris Cronan, has been awarded the 2014 President’s Research Impact Award for the development of a sophisticated online mapping tool that allows Maine communities to visualize future landscape scenarios in localized areas. A […]

The size of a pine nut with grass-blade wings and a disco shimmer, the elusive emerald ash borer (EAB) doesn’t look capable of destroying one tree, let alone upward of 150 million. But this comely green killer is poised to attack Maine’s ash population, having already decimated trees the Midwest while moving rapidly east. EAB is […]

Mussie Beyene, a doctoral student working on SSI’s Safeguarding a Vulnerable Watershed research team was recently awarded the Michael J. Eckardt Dissertation Fellowship for the 2014-15 academic year. Beyene’s research focuses on understanding the hydroclimatic dynamics of lake systems, and the commingling effects of changes in ice out and nutrient loading on Maine’s lakes. Beyene’s […]

Maine EPSCoR at the University of Maine through the Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI) will fund three projects as part of the Emerging Opportunities – Foundations for Future Research grant program. The program is focused on broadening the scope of SSI and the three opportunities offer researchers a chance to engage new stakeholders in new places […]

Brian McGill felt something was missing from life inside the academic “castle in the sky”. The year was 2009 and his discontent was not due to lack of scholarly success. Quite the opposite: McGill’s basic ecology research at Arizona University ranged from the effects of climate change on beavers to variations in leaf traits across […]

Researchers at the Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI) have broken new ground in the pursuit to better understand how sustainable science partnerships between municipalities and universities can be successful. The key ingredient: belief. In a large survey of Maine municipal officials, the factor that made stakeholders most likely to consider a problem-solving partnership with a university was personal […]

Graduate student Jenny Shrum, a Ph.D. candidate in UMaine’s Ecology and Environmental Sciences graduate program and UMaine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI), is working to better understand the relationship between weather and maple sap flow, and how Maine syrup producers will adapt to climate change. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation and Maine EPSCoR […]

For social scientists, measuring opinion is a precise scholarship, a tool that must evolve if research is to advance. This is no easy task. Opinion scales must have uniformity, so studies can be compared. Change is a challenge. Researchers at the SSI are at the forefront of such change. In a recent paper, researchers with […]

The culverts under the streets and byways of Maine’s coastal communities were built to handle a predictable amount of precipitation – a regular load of storm water that changed little from year to year. But the new millennium has brought increases in both precipitation and storm severity. Around the state, culverts meant to last decades […]