Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

Jenny Shrum wants to understand the relationship between climate and maple sap flow – and the potential effects on Maine’s maple syrup industry. It’s a big undertaking, one that could shed light on the future of one of Maine’s more distinctive brands. Shrum, a Masters student at UMaine’s School of Biology and Ecology and a Graduate […]

Michelle Johnson, doctoral candidate in UMaine’s Ecology and Environmental Science program and graduate research assistant with the Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI), will join the US Forest Service’s New York City Urban Field Station as a Social Scientist/Ecologist this fall. Johnson, a member of SSI’s Alternative Futures team who helped develop the award-winning Maine Futures Community […]

Robert Kates, Presidential Professor of Sustainability Science at UMaine, has received the 2014 AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography from the Association of American Geographers. The association noted it “proudly confers this award to Kates in recognition of the many ways that his unrelenting creativity, energy, and care for the world around him […]

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 […]