Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

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 […]

SSI researcher Tim Waring, along with colleagues from Arizona and Austria, has been awarded a grant to convene an international working group at National Institute of Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee. The working group will focus on evolutionary approaches to social-ecological systems change. The goal of the group is to break new […]

SSI researchers Linda Silka, Laura Lindenfeld, Karen Hutchins and others have authored a journal article, “Moving Beyond the Single Discipline: Building a Scholarship of Engagement that Permeates Higher Education (pdf)“, for the Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry. The article uses the example of the Sustainability Solutions Initiative to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with […]

Three Presque Isle high school students, junior Angela Wang and sophomores Sedona Lucas and Zach Rice, have assisted with research on the University of Maine at Presque Isle’s SSI project “Assessing the Feasibility and Sustainability of Grass Biomass Production in Aroostook County.”  The students became involved in the project as part of UMPI’s Central Aroostook […]

SSI researcher Tim Waring’s undergraduate Sustainable Development class is working with the UMaine Sustainability Coordinator to help assemble data needed to complete a submission to the Sustainability Tracking and Rating System (STARS), a project of the American Association of Sustainability in Higher Education. Many leading “green” campuses are already rated by STARS. This ongoing collaboration, […]