Maine Perspective Front Page
Reflections of Environmental Health Found in Vernal Pools
Forested wetlands are the least studied wetlands class and the least protected areas in New England.
In these wetlands are found some of the most specialized habitats for amphibians and reptiles.
The largest and most complex project on amphibians and reptiles by Maine Inland Fisheries, Maine Audubon and the UMaine Department of Plant, Soil and Environmental Sciences concerns vernal pools - small areas that fill with snowmelt and rainwater in spring and dry in the summer. To the untrained eye, vernal pools are the nuisance woodland mud puddles that serve only as breeding grounds for mosquitoes. But without fish as predators, vernal pools provide prime breeding habitat for four indicator species - spotted salamanders, blue-spotted salamanders, wood frogs and fairy shrimp, as well as sources of food and safety for other reptiles, amphibians, mammals and birds.
Heading the vernal pool conservation efforts in the state is UMaine wetlands ecologist Aram Calhoun. Initially, the goal has been to conduct public education outreach to raise awareness and sensitivity to the importance of these areas. She has written a manual for identifying and protecting such wetlands. In April, a Web page will be available with the latest data concerning vernal pools, amphibians and reptiles in Maine. And this spring, a five-year vernal pool monitoring program will be launched in Maine, with up to 100 sites statewide.
"When I give talks, people want to know how we're going to use the data we're now gathering," says Calhoun, who has been involved in reptile and amphibian conservation since 1995. "The answer is that a multiple-use approach to forestry, which is big in this state, is possible. The reality is most environmental degradation occurs out of ignorance. That's why we're trying to raise awareness."
People need to be asking questions about patterned land use practices and their results, Calhoun says. A wetland should be viewed from the perspective of an aerial photo, taking into consideration the surrounding landscape.
"Massachusetts has a vernal pool certification program in which the pools were protected but not the surrounding habitat. Now, many of those pools have lost the amphibians they were regulated to protect due to a lack of protected upland habitat.
"Maine has an opportunity to avoid what happened in its southern, developed neighbors," Calhoun says. "Without unfragmented landscapes, we lose environmental integrity. As a result, we lose not only amphibian and reptile species but other animals that also depend on a healthy habitat, including humans.
"That could be all of Maine in 20 years because the habitats of these species are not being monitored," says Calhoun.
The state of the amphibian population is not any more critical in Maine than elsewhere in the country, says Mark McCollough, leader of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife's Endangered Species Group. However, at this stage in humans' understanding of the animals, no one can really be sure just how critical the situation has become.
"We could be on the verge of disaster for some of these species and not even know it," says McCollough. "Even with the advances we've made in understanding their ecology, we don't know of the population's status."
One of the most frustrating dilemmas for biologists is to get people to link the health of amphibians and reptiles to the health of the environment, Calhoun says.
"Amphibians and reptiles do not have big brown eyes and fuzzy bodies that people love, yet they are indicators of environmental quality and hence, our quality of life. I do a lot of work with the state to affect policy. Sitting in a room with people talking about protecting puddles on which four species are dependent, it is hard for people to make the link that these animals are bioindicators. Habitats are disappearing and species are disappearing," she says.
Calhoun also spearheads the North American Amphibian Monitoring Project in Maine, which was one of the first states in the Northeast to initiate the volunteer-based monitoring program. In the past three years, the monitoring program in Maine has grown from 24 to 57 routes traveled by 120 volunteers monitoring amphibian species. The goal is to establish baseline data during a five-year period to enable the study of patterns and trends in the populations of the species, as well as changes in the landscape. It also will help determine if amphibian declines are happening in Maine.
"That's how the CD for Maine Amphibians and Reptiles came about," says McCollough. "It started as a training tape of frog calls for the volunteers. Then we heard from volunteers that they were turning it on in February to hear the calls of the coming spring. That's why we decided to have the frog chorus in addition to the narrated frog calls. That's dinner music."