Student Spotlight: Karen Hutchins
Graduate Research Assistant, Sustainability Solutions Initiative
IPhD candidate, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine
An avid fly-fisherwoman with deep family roots in Bethel, Karen Hutchins decided to pursue her PhD through SSI because she wanted to conduct research that would help Maine communities. As a member of SSI’s Knowledge-to-Action Collaborative, she is leading a statewide survey of municipal officials to identify the most urgent problems Maine communities face—and find more effective ways to solve them.
What problem/s are you working to solve?
They key problem that our team is addressing is the disconnect between knowledge production and “real-world” action. University researchers produce knowledge, but often, it is not used in decision-making, the suggested solutions do not match the needs of communities, or researchers are not studying the issues communities need us to investigate. In order to help address this mismatch, my research focuses on contributing to models of stakeholder-university collaborations by identifying and exploring the factors that influence the likelihood and style of those partnerships. The belief is that improving researchers’ working relationships with stakeholders will make research and solutions more relevant and useful to stakeholders, and better aligned with community needs.
What progress are you making toward solutions?
Our research is contributing to solutions by helping to understand, analyze, and inform the development of community-university partnerships. We believe these partnerships are critical for developing sustainable solutions. My primary research involves a statewide survey sent to more than 2,500 municipal officials in every community in Maine.
Through this survey, we identified current problems facing municipalities and assessed factors that influenced the likelihood of officials’ interest in developing a community-university partnership, as well as their preferred partnership structure, in terms of the level of involvement in problem identification, research, solution development, and implementation.
Thus far, our analyses show that municipal officials’ belief that university researchers can assist them with solving problems in their communities is the strongest predictor of their interest in a partnership. We are continuing our analyses and our outreach to municipalities, and we will be conducting additional surveys to expand and improve our model.
How could your findings contribute to a more sustainable future in Maine and beyond?
I believe that improving connections between university and college researchers and stakeholders in Maine will contribute to a more sustainable future. This research will help us find more effective ways for universities and communities to work together by identifying stakeholders’ partnership preferences prior to collaboration. Findings also will determine key factors that may help improve collaboration between researchers and stakeholders in order to better identify solutions to some of the state’s most pressing sustainability challenges.
Student Spotlight: Colleen Budzinski
MA student in Communication and Journalism
University of Maine
Colleen Budzinski is working with research teams at SSI partner institutions that are helping to advance one of SSI’s central goals: building a statewide network of coordinated research to address sustainability challenges in Maine. Budzinski’s communication research focuses on facilitating the development of this network, which currently includes ten Maine colleges and universities where SSI teams are working on issues ranging from lake water quality to renewable energy development. A new mother, she says her son and husband inspire her in work to contribute to a more sustainable future.
What problem/s are you working to solve?
My research focuses on working with teams at SSI partner institutions to better understand their needs within the larger SSI project. I examine team dynamics, communication, and stakeholder engagement. My research will analyze communication practices and how they support or undermine interdisciplinary collaboration. I also will assess SSI’s current communication modes, including the website and all-team meetings, in order to understand how SSI researchers at partner institutions perceive these communication platforms. The goal is to provide a critical analysis of their attitudes toward their own projects, SSI in general, and the project’s communication outlets, while observing and better understanding the cultural dynamics of each team.
What progress are you making toward solutions?
We distributed a statewide survey to research teams at SSI partner institutions to better understand team development and engagement while identifying communication barriers. Based on survey results, workshops were developed to help these teams meet EPSCoR grant requirements, site visits were conducted, and the SSI website was redesigned to provide more resources and help these teams stay current with SSI information, people and projects. In the future, we will interview teams to better understand the barriers that each group faces when communicating with one another on an interdisciplinary level and with stakeholders through knowledge-to-action research. Findings from these interviews will help streamline communication for teams at SSI partner institutions.
How could your findings contribute to a more sustainable future in Maine and beyond?
Partner institutions are important to SSI’s overall success in developing a statewide pipeline for sustainability science research in Maine. By serving as a liaison between SSI management teams at the UMaine campus and research teams across the state, the partner institutions program will help build and strengthen SSI’s statewide network. Our research will yield new insights into improving communication to facilitate the development of statewide research networks in Maine and elsewhere.
Student Spotlight: Spencer R. Meyer
Graduate Research Assistant, Sustainability Solutions Initiative
PhD Student, School of Forest Resources
Associate Scientist, Forest Stewardship, Center for Research on Sustainable Forests
University of Maine
A New England native, Spencer Meyer has a passion for the natural world and an appreciation for the interconnections between people and the places where they live. He recently decided to combine his personal interests and professional expertise to pursue a PhD through SSI. After working for years with large landowners on sustainable forest management in Maine, Meyer is examining the bigger picture of landscape conservation as a member of SSI’s Alternative Futures Team. His work on land use models could help Maine communities make more sustainable choices amid pressures ranging from development to rising fuel prices.
What problem/s are you working to solve?
I’m helping to build stakeholder-driven models of land use in Maine. Basically, we want to know from conservationists, foresters, farmers and developers what makes land best suited to their missions. Once we get a better understanding of stakeholders’ needs and land-use suitability, we can begin to identify areas where land uses will likely overlap. For instance, where do forestry and conservation assets co-occur? What areas are most at risk for development and have high conservation value? We can then model multiple scenarios to estimate what might happen in the future.
What progress are you making toward solutions?
We’ve been working with a terrific group of business leaders, public servants, developers, scientists, and other citizens who want to see Maine plan for our state’s future. We recently met with these partners to review our first project results: land use suitability maps for the Lower Penobscot River Watershed, which includes Greater Bangor.
Our maps show areas where land uses are likely to compete and other areas where there are opportunities. For instance, our results reveal that most of the watershed is highly suitable for forestry, and we’ve identified other areas that have notable value for ecosystem services, biodiversity, and recreation. Forestry and conservation are highly compatible, so there are clear opportunities to expand conservation efforts.
We’ve also identified areas that are highly suitable for residential, commercial, or second-home development. We see some locations where this development, if it comes, is likely to have an impact on some of our natural resources.
Our models suggest that there’s plenty of room to accommodate all land uses if Maine communities plan well. We’re now fine-tuning these models based on partner feedback and then spreading the word. We hope to talk with communities, land trusts, state agencies, and landowners about how our maps might help them make decisions.
Now that we have a proof of concept for mapping suitability of development, we’re also planning to expand our work to southern Maine. We’ve partnered with SSI researchers including Dave Owen of the University of Maine Law School to look at how our models can help identify watersheds and forested areas that are most at risk of development. By identifying healthy urban streams that might be at risk of becoming impaired through development, we can help inform communities about the benefits of proactive planning to avoid potential expenses of water quality mitigation required by environmental regulations.
How could your findings contribute to a more sustainable future in Maine and beyond?
As development pressures increase and Maine’s demographic changes, land use pressures shift. By investigating alternative future conditions under multiple land use and demographic scenarios, we hope to help land use planners better match policy tools and economic incentives to the changing needs of Mainers. People tend to be wary of change, but if we don’t plan for it, we may not get the outcomes that best suit our overall needs.
Student Spotlight: Judy Colby-George
Graduate Research Assistant, Sustainability Solutions Initiative
PhD Student, Ecology and Environmental Science
University of Maine
As the owner of a small Geographic Information Systems (GIS) consulting business in Yarmouth, Judy Colby-George specializes in using geospatial tools to “empower citizen to become involved in decision making in their communities.” She had long been considering returning to school, and SSI’s philosophy and ideals appealed to her. Colby-George says she seeks an education that enables her to more deeply explore the work she’s been doing for more than a decade and contribute to making a difference in her community and the state.
What problem/s are you working to solve?
I am looking at how and where GIS is most effective in communicating complex ideas to stakeholders and the public. I’m interested in the ways in which these new technologies can bring people to the table to better understand the choices they are asked to make on a regular basis. For example, on a personal level, people are making decisions about buying, selling, developing, and preserving land and housing. On a community level, municipalities are making choices about what they want to be and how they create policies and communities that reflect those choices. Specifically around land use, communities are deciding what types of development make sense for them and how will they provide jobs, housing, and community based amenities that work for their town.
What progress are you making toward solutions?
I am currently working with two SSI teams, the Sustainable Urban Regions project and ESCAPE (Ecological and Social Change: Adaptation, Place and Evaluation). I’ll be surveying landowners in Greater Portland and Greater Bangor this spring in order to better understand their perceptions of landscape change and their role in it. Landscape change is difficult for many people to envision because it happens incrementally and often on a large scale. My research should illuminate the differences between various groups’ understanding of landscape change, and help communities move toward consensus about the facts of this change even if values differ. A shared understanding of the facts will help communities evaluate and implement policies intended to reach their shared goals.
How could your findings contribute to a more sustainable future in Maine and beyond?
I believe that the work I am doing can help to inform participatory decision making in Maine Communities and the ways in which geospatial technology is used within those processes. In the end, our work will contribute to better ways or best practices for using this technology to empower people to understand problems, envision solutions, and implement effective policies and practices in their communities.
Student Spotlight: Alexander Gray
Masters Student, Ecology and Environmental Science
Graduate Research Assistant, SSI
The Patriot’s Day Storm of 2007 caused an estimated $45 million in infrastructure damage in Maine communities, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. While such severe storms are uncommon, they are expected to become increasingly frequent and more intense due to climate change, and Maine’s coastal communities are particularly vulnerable. Alexander Gray is developing a framework for producing solutions that will help these communities address their particular challenges in adapting to climate change.
What problem/s are you working to solve?
Our research focuses on the risks and vulnerabilities that coastal communities face as climatic conditions change, as well as the barriers that make adapting to these changes difficult. We’re specifically looking at flooding from extreme storms, which can cause costly damage to local communities. Our team is trying to understand the problems associated with managing storm water runoff in a changing climate and the local decision-making processes in Maine coastal towns.
Managing storm water runoff is not a straightforward process. First, using “hard” solutions—making physical infrastructure changes—is very expensive. Second, current climate science and models are often too uncertain and broad to be useful to local decision makers. We need to figure out what information people need and will act on in order to drive solutions.
What progress are you making toward solutions?
We’ve surveyed coastal officials and interviewed stakeholders including county emergency management directors, a regional planning director, a town manager, a town administrator and Maine Department of Transportation staff to understand how they view the problem of storm water runoff and how they’ve been managing it.
We’ve learned from these stakeholders that coastal communities experience different types of damage during storms. For example, In Lincolnville, when heavy rains flood lakefront properties, the town must ask the downstream town of Camden to open a dam in order to lower water levels, but this usually causes flooding in Camden’s downtown riverfront buildings, and so the town is often reluctant to open the dam. In Portland, downtown flooding is the result of culverts that are too small to handle the runoff from severe storms. The city wants to fix the culverts, but limits of federal assistance further strains limited municipal resources.
Our findings so far have made it clear that solutions for Lincolnville, Portland and other communities need to be based both on the particular problems and the type of community, for instance, a small rural town versus a city. In addition, information to solve these problems needs to be specific to each community in order to support their decision-making process.
How could your findings contribute to a more sustainable future in and beyond Maine?
By studying how coastal communities prepared for, and were affected by, extreme weather like the Patriot’s Day Storm of 2007 and Hurricane Bob, we can begin to understand how decision-support tools and information tailored to specific locations can improve each community’s resiliency to storms.
A more sustainable Maine is one in which decisions today don’t adversely affect the generations of tomorrow. Our findings could provide insight into current decision-making processes, and how those processes might change to create more sustainable solutions for the future.
Student Spotlight: Gary Parent
SSI Undergraduate Researcher
Environmental Studies Major
University of Maine at Presque Isle
Gary Parent was in his forties when he decided to pursue his undergraduate degree at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in order to get a good job. A native of Aroostook County who lives in Fort Fairfield, Parent says he has long been concerned about the region’s sustainability. “I would like to remain here and help provide a future for my children so the County’s rich history can be preserved,” he says.
Now in his junior year, Parent is contributing to the region’s future—and gaining marketable skills—as an SSI undergraduate researcher. He is one of several UMPI students helping rural communities in Aroostook County transfer paper tax maps into a digital format, which will enable them to more easily and efficiently manage their data with free Google Earth software.
“Many of these smaller communities don’t have the fiscal ability to purchase software or pay a salary for someone to complete a project like this,” says Parent, who has worked on maps of five towns in Aroostook County including Easton, Mapleton, Chapman, Castle Hill and New Sweden. “This project will allow towns to enter the digital age and go from using 18th century technology to using 21st century technology.”
Parent and his fellow students are working with Chunzeng Wang, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at UMPI, who is overseeing mapping of land ownership in the Aroostook River Watershed and creating a GIS database that links land use to land ownership. Wang’s work is part of an SSI research project on sustainable development of the Aroostook River Watershed led by Jason Johnston, Assistant Professor of Wildlife Ecology at UMPI.
The SSI researchers are studying various aspects of sustainable development in Aroostook County including historical and current land use and its impacts, promoting the region’s unmotorized trails, and identifying the best land for producing biofuels in ways that minimize potential effects on grassland birds and other wildlife. They are working with more than a dozen stakeholders as part of the study.
Students working on the project have the rare opportunity to gain hands-on experience in helping to solve real world problems. For Parent, who also has done GIS mapping for Fort Fairfield, this has made all the difference. “As a 45-year-old, it has taken me a long time to find my niche,” he says. “Using the skills I have learned at UMPI and through some connections I have made through this work, I hope to start a career in a field that focuses on sustainability. This project has definitely given me a head start on that.”
Student Spotlight: Erin Quigley
PhD Student, School of Forest Resources
SSI Graduate Research Assistant
Erin Quigley has covered a lot of ground in her work. She’s been a forestry consultant, wetlands assessor, Forest Service field technician, GIS mapper, adjunct faculty member, canoe trail administrator and “climate change superhero,” among other things. In SSI, she has found a unique opportunity to combine that experience with her degrees in anthropology and sociology and natural resources to help solve sustainability challenges. “I was drawn to SSI’s focus on working with communities to find solutions to real, local problems,” Quigley says. “Not many PhD programs involve that kind of practical work.”
What problem/s are you working to solve?
My research team is working with Wabanaki brown ash basketmakers to prepare for the arrival of the emerald ash borer in Maine. The EAB is an invasive beetle from Asia that destroys all species of ash trees. It was introduced to the U.S. in 2002 and it’s not in Maine yet, but it’s spreading in this direction. We’re trying to bring together basketmakers, tribes, state and federal foresters, university researchers, landowners and others to prevent, detect, and respond to the threat.
Recently, I’ve been focusing on the policy creation process and state-level response planning. I’m looking at a number of issues including what has been effective so far, what states with response plans wish they had done differently, and how all stakeholders can be involved in response planning. I’m working on a white paper that will hopefully be useful for resource managers in Maine and beyond.
What progress are you making toward solutions?
So far we’ve had several workshops to bring together collaborators, stakeholders, and experts to plan the EAB response process. We’ve also had seed collection workshops for youth on Indian Island to start saving ash seeds for future replanting. We’ve gone out in the field with basketmakers to learn more about how they select basket trees. We’re using statistical techniques that incorporate expert knowledge to map the ash resource to prioritize protection areas. And we’re assisting the state in the creation of a formal EAB response plan that works for all stakeholders, including basketmakers, the forest industry, municipalities, and others.
How could your findings contribute to a more sustainable future in Maine and beyond?
A Maine with diverse, healthy socio-ecological systems is a sustainable Maine! We hope to preserve ash species’ role in the Maine ecosystem, while at the same time promoting economic and cultural wellbeing for all Mainers across cultural groups.
Student Spotlight: Miguel Barajas
SSI Undergraduate Researcher
Environmental Science Major
University of Southern Maine
When Miguel Barajas began interning with USM’s Aquatic Systems Group last summer, he never imagined he’d be rising before dawn to hop aboard fishing boats, where his task was to figure out what cod had eaten for breakfast. When fish were captured, he flushed out their stomachs, collected the contents, weighed and measured the cod, and released them back to the sea. “Making fish throw up is definitely an experience this research is giving me that I wouldn’t otherwise have had,” he wryly observes.
Barajas is studying the role of river herring, or alewives, in the cod’s diet. An important food source for cod and many other species, alewives have been on the decline over the past century due largely to human activity on rivers, including dams and pollution from factories.
It’s not clear what happens to groundfish like cod when alewife populations decline. To help solve one piece of the puzzle, Barajas is using computer modeling to simulate how consuming fewer alewives affects their growth. His findings could yield clues to help revive Maine’s decimated groundfisheries.
“If the computer models suggest that reductions in river herring negatively affect groundfish growth, it may be possible that future efforts to restore river herring could positively affect groundfish growth,” Barajas says. “This would have many economic implications for the Gulf of Maine groundfish industry as well as the surrounding coastal communities.”
Barajas is working with Karen Wilson, Assistant Research Professor, and Theo Willis, adjunct assistant professor, both of USM’s Department of Environmental Science. They are members of an SSI research team at Bowdoin, Bates and USM studying alewife restoration in the Kennebec and Androscoggin rivers, and the ecological and economic impacts of these efforts on fisheries and economies from the headwaters to the coast.
Led by John Lichter, Samuel S. Butcher Associate Professor in the Natural Sciences at Bowdoin, the project will help communities and groups make more informed decisions about the costs and benefits of river restoration efforts. It also will contribute to a better understanding of the effects of river restoration on fisheries and economies at the basin and town scales.
Now a junior at USM, Barajas is already hooked on doing research that helps solve sustainability challenges. “Through my experiences working on the SSI research, I have come to the realization that I want to continue studying marine and freshwater systems,” Barajas says. “I want to focus on the management of these resources for future generations in Maine.”
Student Spotlight: Eileen Johnson
Graduate Research Assistant, Sustainability Solutions Initiative
PhD Student, Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Program Manager/GIS Analyst and Adjunct Lecturer in Environmental Studies, Bowdoin College
Eileen Johnson has a unique perspective on SSI: she is a PhD student at UMaine and a staff person and lecturer at Bowdoin College, where she facilitates community based research projects in the Environmental Studies Program. She brings this experience to SSI, which she chose for her doctoral work because of its focus on connecting knowledge with action and its emphasis on developing effective strategies for engaging stakeholders.
What problem/s are you working to solve?
I am currently a member of an SSI team comprised of researchers from Bates, Bowdoin and the University of Southern Maine. Our research focuses on river systems and seeks to understand barriers to restoration.
What progress are you making toward solutions?
My research focuses on the role of institutions and the incorporation of stakeholders in the research process. Through my research, I have come to have a fuller understanding of how stakeholders characterize “restoration,” what questions and concerns they have about the two river systems of study, as well as understanding opportunities for engaging stakeholders throughout the research process, including effective ways of sharing our results.
How could your findings contribute to a more sustainable future in Maine and beyond?
Our research will help communities to better understand the value of restored river systems as well as help us understand how we can collaborate more effectively with stakeholders. I hope that our work will help to forge collaborations among all of the different individuals and groups currently connected with our two rivers of study, the Androscoggin and Kennebec.
