Sustainability Toolbox

Food Rescue Maine

Wasted food is a huge issue, both globally, and right here in Maine. Forty percent of the food produced for human consumption in the United States is wasted every year. Learn more about food waste in Maine and how you can make a difference.

Reopening Reuse: COVID-19 Safety for Community Reuse in Maine (Sept. 2020)

A collection of guidance, best practices, and current policies adopted by federal and state government, as well as other Maine thrift stores to assist community-based thrift stores in deciding whether and how to reopen safely during the coronavirus outbreak.

Community Waste Toolkit

The Community Waste Toolkit is a set of best practices for waste reduction in the state of Maine. Based on interviews with organizations, municipalities, and community groups across the state of Maine, the Toolkit is designed to share success stories across four different categories: organics management, reuse, policy, and community engagement.

WEEDucator

WEEDucator is a tool to help beginning farmers and agriculture students virtually explore non-chemical weed management.

BeeMapper

BeeMapper is an online tool that allows blueberry growers to assess the predicted wild bee abundance in the landscape surrounding their crop fields. Knowing the numbers and types of wild bees in the surrounding landscape may help growers budget how many honeybee hives to rent and help determine if they could take more action to enhance wild pollinator populations on their fields. BeeMapper is part of a pollinator toolbox that includes wild bee identification and monitoring tools, guidelines on installing pollinator plantings, and a budgetary tool to explore financial feasibility of pollination management decisions.

Maine Futures Community Mapper

The Maine Futures Community Mapper (MFCM) is 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. The MFCM was created by the Sustainability Solutions Initiative’s (SSI) Alternative Futures Team as part of the Mapping a Sustainable Future Project.

Read more about the development of the MFCM.

Maine Municipal Guide to Mapping and Conserving Vernal Pools (pdf)

Best practices from the Maine Vernal Pools Mapping Project are available to all towns through the Maine Municipal Guide to Mapping and Conserving Vernal Pool Resources, co-written by Dawn Morgan and Aram Calhoun. This comprehensive guide covers everything from vernal pool ecology to training citizen scientists how to identify and assess vernal pools. This guide was developed as part of a group of projects under SSI’s Protecting Natural Resources at the Community Scale project.

Water & Sustainability Links

This page provides links to sites dealing with water and sustainability resources at a national, regional and local level. Please note that this page is not updated on a regular basis so some links may not be current.

Mitchell Center Resources

Links to uploaded files of Mitchell Center presentations, programs, reports and more.

KnowledgeBase

The KnowledgeBase is a geographically focused bibliographic database for the Gulf of Maine and its watershed. The KB contains references relevant to the freshwater, marine, and terrestrial environments of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia and the offshore waters of the Gulf of Maine.

Data and documents from earlier Mitchell Center research projects are available through the KnowledgeBase including the following: