Calhoun, Jansujwicz speak with BDN for article about vernal pools
The Bangor Daily News interviewed Aram Calhoun, a professor of wetland ecology at the University of Maine, and Jessica Jansujwicz, an assistant research professor at UMaine, for an article about vernal pools. Vernal pools are small, temporary wetlands that appear in the spring when snow melt and precipitation fill shallow depressions in forest landscapes, the article states. “The more we studied them, the more integral to the functioning of the New England landscape we realized they are,” said Calhoun. “What they supply for us goes way beyond their size or abundance.” Half of Maine’s reptile and amphibian species use vernal pools to forage or take refuge, and the pools provide nutrition for a range of forest species, according to the article. But often they are found on private property, where landowners may want to fill them in. Calhoun launched the website “Of Pools and People” to help educate landowners about vernal pools and their value. “You don’t protect something that you don’t understand. It’s about trying to make these systems real to people,” Calhoun said. After amphibians lay their eggs in the pools, they can move up to a mile away or more to hibernate, so the vernal pool ecosystem stretches beyond the pool itself. “Putting a circle around them doesn’t protect their landscape-scale functions,” Calhoun said. Maine’s Natural Resources Protection Act (NRPA) protects vernal pools considered “significant” — those containing a large number of egg masses or supporting an endangered or threatened species. “The top-down approaches put things on the radar screen. It gave us a gap to fill,” said Calhoun, who has worked with scientists and researchers across disciplines to fill the gaps in conservation. “We started talking to individual landowners, and we did a lot of focus groups,” said Jansujwicz, who researched vernal pools as a graduate student. “The landscape (is) dominated by people, so you have to understand what people’s goals are. A lot of the benefits don’t come obvious to landowners.” Jansujwicz added many landowners were wary of regulations infringing on their decisions about their private property. “People were unhappy with a one-size-fits-all, top-down approach,” said Calhoun, whose team collaborated with several agencies and organizations to develop the Special Resource Area Management Plan (SAMP) for vernal pools in 2016. The plan increased the buffer around protected vernal pools, allowed local land trusts to assume their stewardship, and delegated authority to town governments rather than the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, the BDN reported. Calhoun said the SAMP could be applied to other landowner-friendly conservation projects as well. “Certainly it is something that is relevant to Down East fisheries, aquaculture and shellfish fisheries,” Calhoun said. “That would be wonderful if we could do that.”