Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

This 3-year project, funded by a NOAA “B-WET” grant and coordinated by Sarah Nelson, will engage 1,275 students and 30 high school teachers in research collaborations with professional scientists on the changing nature of the snowpack across Maine. The project focus is on the coastal climate zone where snowmelt provides clues for diadromous fish migration […]

Researcher Sarah Nelson was interviewed recently by the Portland Press Herald about her work with dragonfly larvae, just one of the “sentinel species” that can provide early indicators to scientists about potentially harmful environmental conditions.  Nelson’s work focuses on food web mercury levels in Acadia National Park and in 25 other national parks across the […]

Citizen scientists who are collecting dragonfly larvae at 25 National Parks under the guidance of Mitchell Center researcher Sarah Nelson, now have a place to share their discoveries. The dragonfly larvae will be used to determine mercury levels in National Park lakes and to test the theory that dragonfly larvae can be used as indictors […]

SSI researcher Jessica Leahy was interviewed for an article in the Kennebec Journal that appeared July 13, 2013. Leahy, Associate Professor of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources in the UMaine School of Forest Resources, discussed Maine’s Great Ponds Act which allows open access to undeveloped lands in Maine for hunting and fishing. Leahy said in […]

Press Release: July 29, 2013 Orono, ME – Maine and New Hampshire’s coastal tourism and shellfish industries contribute millions of dollars annually to the regional economy. In Maine in 2010, coastal tourism and recreation added $1.1 billion to Maine’s gross domestic product, while shellfish landings in that same year generated revenues of $347 million. But […]

Researchers from SSI’s Protecting Natural Resources at the Community Scale (Vernal Pool) team have been awarded  a grant from the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) program for their project, “Of Pools and People: Small Natural Features with Large Ecosystem Functions in Urbanizing Landscapes. “  This 4-year project was funded for $1.49M and […]

Mitchell Center researcher Sarah Nelson recently completed a report that brings together data spanning 30 years of sampling at a set of 31 of the U.S. Environmental Protections Agency’s Long Term Monitoring Network lakes (called TIME lakes). The lakes were originally part of EMAP, the EPA’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program. These lakes are sensitive […]

Maine EPSCoR has announced the poster winners from the 2013 Maine EPSCoR Conference that was held on September 30 at Wells Conference Center. The winning posters for the undergraduate and graduate student competitions are posted at the Mitchell Center for viewing. The student winners are as follows: High School Competition Sedona Lucas, Zachary Rice, Sijia […]

SSI Doctoral Student Kristine Hoffman was featured on MPBN’s “Maine Things Considered” radio show on August 5, discussing some of the unusual findings from her vernal pool research. Kristine is a team member on the Protecting Natural Resources at the Community Scale project. To read the full MPBN story or listen to a podcast of […]

SSI researcher Jessica Leahy was interviewed for an article in the Kennebec Journal that appeared July 13, 2013. Leahy, Associate Professor of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources in the UMaine School of Forest Resources, discussed Maine’s Great Ponds Act which allows open access to undeveloped lands in Maine for hunting and fishing. Leahy said in […]