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See the related Blog entry looking at funding
Over the past two weeks Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and
Research Center were hosts to more than 50 scientists who came to Acadia to help
identify critical research issues and research opportunities at the Park. The
scientists participated in five day-long sessions, each looking at a different
area of scientific inquiry in the Park: freshwater resource issues, marine
and estuarine studies, wildlife studies, physical science studies, and terrestrial
issue studies. Each session focused on the following questions:
- What are the Park's current research needs? In particular, what
current research issues have we missed?
- What are the emerging issues? What should we be looking at now, in
anticipation of future concerns?
- What is the role of Acadia NP in the research landscape? Assuming you had
the funding, what research would you like to be doing here?
- How can we make the Schoodic center into a more useful, attractive
scientific research resource?
David Manski, Chief of Resource Management at Acadia, began the sessions with
an overview of the issues that are at the top of his list as he deals with
day-to-day concerns at the park and as he thinks ahead to issues on the horizon.
Manski's list included the following primary areas of concern:
As David put it, "In order to conserve a resource, we have to know it
is here in the first place." Although Acadia has up-to-date lists of all
the vascular plants and vertebrate animals within the Park, little is known
about the varieties of non-vascular plants and invertebrates. The
"Bio-Blitz" events held at the Schoodic center over the past few
years have helped fill out the picture for selected orders of insects, but
there is still a great deal of new work to do here.
- Visitor Experience and Impacts
Acadia has the highest concentration of visitors per square mile of any of
the non-urban parks in the NPS. This makes it important to understand what
makes for a positive visitor experience as well as to understand the impacts
of visitor use.
How do you restore areas that see heavy use and that are often a harsh
environment, in terms of climate and lack of soil? How do you propagate the
sometimes rare species that grow in these areas?
- Changing Land Use Patterns
The areas around Acadia are under sometimes intense development pressure.
As development continues, Park ecosystems are separated by developed areas.
What is the impact of ecosystem fragmentation on plant and animal communities?
What are the impacts of development, and new wells and septic systems, on the
Park's water resources? What is the impact on estuarine systems?
It is well known that invasive exotics can pose real danger to existing
natural systems. About 1/4 of Acadia's vascular plants are non-native. Which
of these plants poses a threat? The same question can be asked of animals.
When a plant or animal does emerge as an invasive threat, how should it be
managed?
Acadia has collected air-quality data over a period of decades. These data
are a research resource. They also tell us that the Park experiences
significant air-quality problems at various times, and that these problems
result in high levels of acidification and mercury in the Park. What is less
well understood are the impacts of this pollution. How do high levels of
mercury effect fish? What are the impacts of high levels of ozone, combined
with acid rain, on forest health? There is a great need for research into
questions such as these.
- Rare Species Conservation
Recent inventories and historical studies tell us that we have about 1000
species of vascular plants in the Park, and that around 240 species have
disappeared over time. How many of these disappearances are natural--a
function of forest succession, perhaps? How many are caused by people? We
don't know. We need to have a better understanding not only of what is rare,
but of what is making each species rare.
- Management of Native Animals
In general, the Park is not in the animal management business. But there
are situations in which the Park needs the help of scientists to better
understand the health and dynamics of an animal population, particularly as
humans put pressure on the animals. For example, there is evidence that the
deer population in the Park is declining. At the same time, communities
surrounding the Park are considering instituting a deer hunt. The Park needs
to better understand the dynamics of the deer population, including birth
rates, predation by coyotes, loss through road kill, and other factors. As
another example, young eels (elvers) are now a hot commodity in overseas
seafood markets and so are being fished aggressively as they make their way
back up streams into the Park. What is the ecological niche filled by eels in
the Park? What happens if a large part of a given year's offspring are removed
from the system?
- Data and Information Management
Scientific information is valuable to the extent that it is accessible. In
particular the Park needs to find ways to make the data and results from
research available as the foundation for work by other scientists. It also
needs to ensure that these data are accessible over the long run, since
knowing what happened in the past is often critical to understanding what is
happening now.
The workshops were conducted by Kathy Tonnessen, an NPS scientist and
scientific research coordinator who is based in the northern Rocky Mountain
area. Tonnessen will use the workshops as a starting point in a process that
will result in the publication of a Research Opportunities Catalog for Acadia
National Park. In addition to the face-to-face conversations with scientists,
Tonnessen will consult bibliographies of relevant research and will survey the
body of existing research. The resulting catalog will provide potential
researchers with an overview of the scientific work that is most important from
the standpoint of Park priorities. The catalog will also identify the areas in
which the Park can serve as a valuable resource and outdoor laboratory for
scientific questions that reach beyond the Park's own management concerns.
Publication of the catalog is expected in 2007. It will be published both in
paper form and in a more "living," updated form on the Internet.
Acadia Partners has published a complete summary of each of the five research
catalog workshops that will be of interest to anyone seeking a more detailed
look at the current and emerging research concerns at Acadia. It is available here
on this website.
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