We're filming this event, so that those of us, this happy family, this other main conservation collaborative can catch it on our website. And it's a really, really exciting topic to me. It's very compelling for so many reasons that we all know, but for us specifically, as we've been, you know, listening to conversations nationally, locally about the changing environment, water really seems to rise to the top in a lot of different ways as an issue that needs to be kind of addressed, and also a way to really engage all sorts of people. And there really is such a connection to water here in Maine. So I want to thank the University of New England for providing the space, for the food, for signage, great signage out. It's really a treat to be here. And I really want to thank our presenters, who we will hear from shortly. And I thank all of you for attending. The evening will, we're a little behind schedule, but it shouldn't be a problem. We'll proceed that we'll have introductions, short introductions, and if you could share your name and the group that you represent. And then the presenters will give about a 15, 20 minute talk. They have PowerPoint presentations, and we will keep the questions to clarifying questions after they present. We're going to have each of them present, and then we'll have discussion. So if they're bigger questions, write them down so you can share that after all of the presenters have gone. And then we're going to dig into discussion about, you know, basically sort of why you're here, what your group wants to learn, what it's done, what's important to your individual organization about water, and then take it to the next level and talk about the idea of collaboration. You'll hear different ideas and perspectives and experiences from the presenters, and we hope both that this is an opportunity for sharing ideas. It's an opportunity to hear about specific projects that your group could potentially take back with you and do, you know, right away. And then we really want to go to that next level of is there something that as a group we can do better than we can alone. So we'll just start with introductions. And I'll start with Paul. Here we go. Can we? No. Okay. Great. My name is Paul Hunt, I'm the environmental manager with the Portland Water District. And you'll hear plenty from me, so I'm going to move on to the next. Good evening, everyone. You'll hear from me too. I'm Kevin Ryan. I head up the Ecological Services Division of FB Environmental. And I'm Chris Fort. I work here at UNE in the Department of Environmental Studies and also at the Wells Reserve with the Coastal Training Program. And you'll hear more about that. I'm Doreen Johnson. I work with the Collaborative with Jess, and we are so excited that you guys came all the way out here. It's a little bit different, a different topic. And we're excited about our summer associates both being here, Conner and Sophie. So thanks for coming. My name is Emily Green. I'm with Rachel Carson. That's the Wildlife Refuge. And we do a lot of habitat restoration and very little with water. So I'm here just as a guest, but also to kind of figure out what's going on in our community and maybe what we can do better for the environment on our end. I'm Eridah Bonobacher. I'm the Associated Oceanside Conservation Trust and Aged Tribal. I'm Michael Parker from the Prezabska Regional Land Trust. Kathy Mills, who likes snacks, especially this hour. Scarborough Land Trust. And I'm Stephanie Smith from the Friends of Scarborough Marsh, so obviously anything we can learn about water ships and the impact of whatever is happening. And Betsy Garrett also from Friends of Scarborough Marsh. And I'm Sophie Scott. As Doreen mentioned, I'm the summer communication associate for SMCC this summer. I'm Maggie Burns, and I work with Kavanaugh F-Pay environmentals. I'm Connor Montello. I'm the other associate for SMCC as the GIS associate, and I also work with Portland Trails. So it's great. We have a nice, cozy group, and behind us, each of us carries a whole other group with representation of, oh, that behind us too, yes. I'm Kat Redd. I'm representing the cheerleading life group. Paul Hunt is my husband. Paul Hunt is my husband. So I brought my mother with me, so if you don't like my talk, you have to pretend that you did. Great. So without further ado, take it away, Paul. It's odd to be holding a microphone. I feel like Bob Barker. Wait, only half of us will know who I'm talking about. Thank you all very much for the opportunity to talk today. I'm Paul Hunt, the environmental manager with the Portland Water District. So it might seem odd to have someone from the water district speaking to a land group, but I will tell you that I've been in the water protection business for over 20 years, and it took me about half that time to come to realize that water protection is really all about land conservation. So that's what I'm going to talk about. And the title of my talk is Trees Not Treatment, and I just want to recognize my colleague, Laurel Jackson, who works in my office and manages the program I'm going to be talking about. So my boss always says, start a letter with what you're going to say, and then repeat it, and then explain it, and then repeat it. So I'm going to start with the end and say that the Portland Water District has a land conservation program that applies to the Sabaga Lake watershed, and the program kind of works this way. When a land owner, like this one, decides he or she wants to conserve their land, either by easement or fee, and has found a land trust to do that transaction with, they make that decision first. The water district is not involved in that part of the process. But then the next step is that the land trust brings that proposal to us and says, hey, we have an opportunity here to conserve this property. Is the water district interested? And we evaluate the property for the degree to which we think it benefits drinking water quality, and come up with kind of a number. The staff comes up with a number, a recommended contribution, and then our board of trustees votes on that, on whether or not to make that contribution. In the past 10 years, we have been involved in land transactions by the land trusts in the watershed, totaling almost $4.5 million in value of all the transactions, and the district has paid about a half a million dollars toward that amount. That is such a good question. The answer to your question is, you can see this graph starts in 2008, and until 2015, the height of the bar is how many acres went under easement or were conserved in fee or purchased in fee, and the number in the box is how many transactions that amounts to. So I think it's about 16 or so that have occurred. You can add them up. But it's about 4,000 acres of land altogether. This is how my talk is organized. You'll notice I'm going fast because I'm trying to stay on time. First, I'll tell you about my company, and if they go like a little bit, then I'll tell you about the program and how it came to be. I'll talk about the process by which we evaluate land to determine what the district's level of contribution should be, and then I'll try to answer any questions if there's time. I've been working for the Portland Water District on about 17 years. I'm not just saying this because I still work there. The best company I've ever worked for. I've worked public and private, and this is my favorite because it's sort of a combination. It's a nonprofit, but it produces a product, and so it's kind of like the best of both worlds. We've been providing drinking water to Greater Portland since 1908. We're also Maine's largest wastewater utility, but I'm not going to talk about that half of the business. The program I'm going to talk about is on the water side of our business. Here's Tobago Lake from the air. It's enormous. If you haven't been there, it's a 30,000 acre lake, and it averages 100 feet over that entire area. If you do the math, area 30,000 acres, 100 feet, you can convert that to volume and then convert that to gallons, and you get almost a trillion gallons of water, which is kind of a stunning number. I used to think a trillion was like infinity until the great financial catastrophe of 2008, and then you realize it is actually a finite amount, but we use about 8 billion gallons in a year to serve all of Greater Portland. That means we have over 100 years in storage, which is an enviable position. Imagine if you're in California, how much you'd give for 100 years worth of water in storage. I'll also tell you that the water from Tobago Lake is so clean that we are one of only 50 out of about 13,000 utilities in the United States that is not required to filter the water before we disinfect it and send it to our customers. The water comes out of the lake, it's disinfected, and then you are drinking it, and only 50 utilities in the country qualify for that exemption. Here's the watershed. Ten times as big as the lake are 280,000 acres. They're about more than 20 towns. Some of them just have a little tiny piece, but there's 20 towns that make up the watershed. These last two bullets should be reversed. It's largely forested, that's the good news, but it's more than 90% privately owned forest, so it could be converted, but if the landowners choose to, they want to make it into a subdivision, they can. So that's really our big challenge, and like I say, it took me probably 10 years of working there to realize that's a key challenge for the long-term health of Subega Lake is that 91.5% privately owned forest that makes up the watershed. Just to give you a sense of how fortunate we are, if you notice the Subega Lake watershed, when you're a kid you learn that a watershed is like a bowl and the lake sits in the bottom of the bowl. Notice that the Subega Lake watershed is not shaped like a bowl, it's long and skinny, and almost all of the watershed is north and west of the lake. None of it is south and east of the lake. Well, south and east of the lake is greater Portland, and so if that were in the watershed, all that runoff would flow into the lake, it wouldn't be as clean. This is what the watershed kind of typically looks like. This is the Naples Causeway. All I want you to see from that picture is green and furry. It's really very forested, and that's what is treating the water. That's why the water is so clean. The district has been protecting Subega Lake, as I say, for over 100 years, our watershed control program, which is a legal requirement of a public water utility, has these three, for 100 years, has had three major components, and they're represented by those three pictures. Inspecting projects, particularly in the shoreland zone of the lake, when a house is being built or a septic system is being put in, we're there to inspect it and make sure no soil is flowing into the lake. Just to give you a sense of how often we do that, this map just shows you each of those dots as an inspection we've done. There are about 5,000 of them in a year, 500 in a year, so over a 10-year period, about 5,000. And you can just see, we kind of ring the lake, we go and if there's a project going on, we just want to make sure it's being done properly. Inspection, the middle picture represents education and outreach. We communicate with children and adults about what we're trying to do, what threatens the lake, so that they'll help us to protect it. And then the last thing we do is we patrol by boat the southern part of the lake, which is where our intakes are, being drawn from to make sure no one's swimming and the rules are being followed. So inspection, education, outreach, and security, that's been our program really for 100 years. It's only in the last 10 that we've kind of come to realize that even if the shoreland zone is very healthy because all the construction projects are being done well, if the land behind the shoreland zone gets converted from forest to parking lot, the water quality in the lake is not going to be as high as it is now. So we really started looking up Watershed and saying, what can we do about that particular issue? And we had worked with the land trust a little bit, kind of on an ad hoc basis. They would come to us and say, hey, there's a project we're working on, it's in the Sabaga Lake Watershed, would you help us pay for it? And we'd say, I don't know, I really had no, there was no program and I went to the board and said, could we give like a few thousand dollars to help with this transaction? And there was no program, no policy about what do we do when land is being conserved in the Watershed. So in 2007, our board adopted a policy which essentially said we're not going to buy all the land in the Watershed, that's not feasible or desirable, we don't want to own all the land in the Watershed, but we support efforts of others to conserve land in perpetuity in its forested state. You might say, it's so big deal, there's no money involved, it didn't say anything about contribution, just said we believe in it. But when you work for a sort of non-profit policy is really important, it's like a statement of principles and that's sort of where it begins and once you have a statement of principles that the board has voted on and said, yes we believe in that, then you can start thinking about, well should we have a program to implement that policy? So that's what happened next, and we made some contributions after 2007 to some land conservation deals, and it was in 2013 that we created a program which is the program I was talking about with two goals, and we set out to do this with two goals, one was to have a consistent methodology because as I said, Land Trust would come to us and say, we're doing this deal, can you help us? And we would say, okay, how much? And they'd say, how about $10,000? And we'd say, okay, we'll bring it to the board and we really had no methodology to say how much is it really worth? And the other thing was, we loved that land was being conserved in the watershed but we said to the Land Trust, can you go a little faster? You conserved 100 acres this year but there's 300,000 of them out there, could you do more? And they said, if there was more money, we could do more. So that was when our board sort of deliberated on that and established a Land Conservation Program which is, again, has money attached to it. It was really all about this policy, behind this policy that we believe in conservation and the policy several pages long or the program, but really just remember this one number. The program says the district will contribute up to 25% of the transaction value which, as you know, if you're in the Land Trust business, a transaction can be worth a million dollars. So 25%, now we're talking about a much larger contribution on the part of the district. So how does it work? Well, first thing we did is we said, well, not all transactions in the watershed are worth the same as others because, again, our goal is water quality.  So we took the watershed and we zoned it into three zones. It's hard to see on this map so I'll zoom in a little bit more and show you how it works. So essentially all it says is the closer you are to water, the more we value this transaction because the more it does for water quality. So you can see there's like buffers around all the streams of, I think, a thousand feet. That's zone one, a land transaction in there, we value the highest. Zone two is in green and then brown is zone three. That's like the top of the ridges. So that's further away from water. We still will contribute to a land deal there, but it just doesn't have we zoned the watershed that way. And then once landowner and land trust agree on a transaction, then they come to us and say will you help, will you contribute to this? And so what we do is we evaluate the property. It's a four page report. I won't go through it all in detail except the last two pages because that's kind of where all the action is. This is where we come up with a number. So in this particular example, first thing we do is look at how many acres it is and how much of it is in zone one and zone two and zone three. And so you can see this property shown in this outline in red is mostly in zones one and two. Forest cover is the next thing we look at because land that's covered in trees is going to do more for water quality than land where the trees are gone. So we value that a little bit higher and we add two percent.  The third thing we look at is is it underlain by water and sand and gravel aquifers. If it is then again water is going to be moving through that land and sort of naturally being cleaned. So that's more valuable to us. And then are there wetlands on the property? Because again wetlands are doing a lot of water treatment so if there's wetlands then we value that higher and add another two percent. This last page has a lot of numbers on it but don't worry about them because I'll just highlight the ones you want to know. We start by what is the overall value of this transaction if it's in E or in easement. What's the value of it? Is it an appraised value? We also do a calculation and we pick the lower of the two in case the land trust is paying a lot more than we think it would be worth. Which sometimes happens, other times it's the other way around. But we come up with an overall value and then if it's in zone one we start at 15 percent. So if no other factors are in play but it's in zone one our recommendation to our board would be we should contribute 15 percent. And then we just look at each of those factors that I told you about. One I didn't mention is if it's in one of the seven towns right around the lake we add 2 percent because it's very close to Sabago Lake. The next thing we do is we say is it more than 50 percent forested? If yes we add two more percent but in this case it wasn't then we ask is it more than 10 percent of the land underlain by sand and gravel aquifer? If yes we add another two percent. Is it more than 20 percent wetland? That's worth two percent and then there's this other category. Is there anything else that isn't covered by all that that we think is important? If so then staff can recommend another two percent. So then we do the math and you say okay it's 160,000 times 21 percent. So staff would recommend to the board a contribution in this case of $33,600 which is what we did recommend and then the board votes on it and they can say no, they can say yes, they can change the amount of water that's independent and they run the company but staff makes a recommendation and then the board votes and I will say that since we started this the board has voted 11 to zero every single time to accept the staff's recommendation so they like what we came up with. So this is kind of the end result is this is showing you the Sabago Lake watershed outline. There's a little land in green that's all the district owns. We own less than 1 percent and some of it's even out of the watershed but that's the rest that you see in gray is land that is protected or conserved. Either Sabago Lake State Park is part of that, White Mountain National Forest you can see there and then the smaller ones are land trust parcels that are either owned in fee or in easement by the land trust. So that's what we started with and now what I'm going to add is these are all the properties that have been conserved with district support in the past 10 years or so the ones shown in pink. So you can see that it's starting to add up to a significant increase in the total amount of conserved land. Okay so the last thing I'm going to talk about is this one water idea this sort of theme of tonight and in the water business what one water has come to mean and you hear that phrase in my business a lot is that historically water management involves lots of different things. There's storm water treatment, there's irrigation for agriculture there's a lot of ways that humans are engineering the environment to manage water issues and historically they've been done independent of one another. There's a water department that found a source of water, treated it and provided it to customers and then a different department maybe even another whole organization responsible for collecting that and suing it to a treatment plant and treating it. Another department working on storm water these things were all done in isolation and more and more and our company is really an example of this. We're a combined water and wastewater utility so we approach questions and engineering solutions to water issues with water and wastewater in mind and we also partner with the cities that we serve on storm water management and so we're kind of looking more holistically at the issue of water because it's the same drop of water that is first being consumed and then being flushed and then being it's the same drop of water and so solutions that kind of take all that into account can often be more cost effective so that's sort of the one water idea so for you I would say as I thought about my talk tonight I would say there's something I would call the one forest idea and that is that often land conservation or there are organizations out there that want to see land conserved for lots of different reasons for jobs you know for forest jobs working forest products that come from those jobs preserve conserve wildlife habitat outdoor recreation all of these things and I guess the idea I would promote is that you know rather than having eight different goals and eight different organizations looking for eight different properties to conserve to meet their eight goals if everyone could get together and contribute one dollar a piece then you'd have eight dollars and you can maybe purchase one piece of property that does all of those things or many of them so meeting many goals with one transaction which is again kind of the one water ideas solving many water problems with one solution I think that's my last slide so I don't know how I did but I'm happy to answer any questions very well nice job I don't have any quick clarifying questions for Paul again we'll have time afterwards to get it to the meat do you know what land trusts are are there too many to mention? well there are two the two that make up the bulk of it are Western Foothills Land Trust and Luneco Land Trust and then there are three others that have little tiny pieces we have done transactions with two of them by the way so if it's in the watershed and we've done a transaction with Swam and we've done a transaction with a boys and girls camp that didn't involve a land trust so essentially anybody that wants to conserve land in perpetuity in the watershed is eligible this is perhaps nitpicking but maybe I don't think to a good conversation you put lawn irrigation in as a separate item is that because you were thinking about Portland as a metropolitan area it seems like that was me about two days ago saying what are all the things what are important things that people find important to use water for certainly in other states it's a bigger deal to have water from water in your lawn so that there are periods of time when you can't water your lawn we don't really face that very often in a reusing water as an issue which is a one water kind of solution is thinking more holistically about the use of water and what's the most cost effective way to meet our needs or reusing water which happens in many states doesn't happen in Maine yet but I'm sure well we're a water rich state they've come into the ground so people don't really realize it came out of the sewage plant I know that that's true and how many communities depend on this water source? 11 200,000 people all together and really all of us do because we've ever been treated in a medical center if you've ever gone to Eden, Portland there's our water system is serving a large percentage of Maine's population at least intermittently okay thanks Paul and Kevin and Maggie are going to speak next but before we had some folks come in while Paul was speaking so I just wanted to give the four of you a chance to introduce yourselves your name and your organization anyone can start Rochelle, why don't you start I'm Rochelle from the Prism's Cup Regional Land Trust I'm Jean Newn from Three Rivers Land Trust I'm Helen Naylor from Three Rivers Land Trust also sorry we're late a lot of traffic same traffic Bryce Hawk with Maine Audubon so we now have 11 groups in the room not counting our presenters so now Paul and Maggie well hello again everybody thanks for coming tonight again I'm Kevin Ryan I'm here with Maggie Burns from FB Environmental what's that? it's okay I'll let it go so FB Environmental we're truly a small business we have nine people spread over two offices our headquarters is here in Maine and Portland and we have another office in Portsmouth, New Hampshire it was started by Forest Bell in 2001 he was hired to do some lake assessment projects as I understand in Maine and the business just kind of grew from there he just kept getting work needed to hire employees and now this many years later he's got FB Environmental and if he was here he'd say it's what we do is basically where science meets civics we take the best available scientific information that is that's known currently and apply it to conservation projects to produce tangible on the ground conservation results so most of our work is done in the public sector we work a lot for a lot of municipalities mostly in Maine and New Hampshire but we do work throughout New England but of course it's concentrated around our offices and we work for a lot of watershed organizations and lake organizations as well we've worked for a number of land trusts we have a partnership with SMCC where we've done a bunch of different types of work for land trusts anything from easement monitoring to baseline documentation, natural resources inventory just about anything a land trust could need help with we work with state and federal governments and we do do some private work as well we don't avoid the private clients it just so happens that way I've helped out recently with several clean energy projects involving either solar power sometimes wind power and occasionally a private land owner will ask you to do a natural resources inventory on the land or something like that so our work spans the realms of environmental science and ecology just to clarify environmental science being the physical parameters of the environment things like dissolved oxygen and salinity of your water, everything like that and ecology being organisms and the relationship to one another and to their environment so a lot of what we do is water quality monitoring and water quality fixing that's sort of what we're known for to borrow from something I heard Fred Dillon of South Portland say you've heard of non-point source pollution is sort of like death by a thousand cuts well a lot of what we do is sort of healing by a thousand band-aids just have a lot of small projects all over just fixing fixing we do watershed scale things but then we have a lot of projects too that are just fixing little issues here and there and so we're here today just to give an overview of some of the projects that we do are specific to water quality we're going to talk about what we've got going on with the Windham Land Trust and we're going to turn it over to Maggie in a minute where we're monitoring two brooks a small body of water for them we work with the Keyser Lake Watershed Association we've been monitoring water quality in Keyser Lake for a long time and they've recently started up a climate change observatory and lastly I'm going to talk about a project that we've done a few years ago with the Shabeeq and Cumberland Land Trust which where we don't have our hands in the water but nevertheless as Paul was mentioning what you do with the land has an effect on the water so it has to do with the land acquisition project there but what we want to get across too is that as we are we are a business we're a consulting firm people do hire us to go out do this produce report give us the results but since we're a small firm we also have the flexibility to start up partnerships with other organizations and so sometimes we may handle one aspect of a project and we're actually in the field with members of the other organizations some of which of Maggie is going to talk about so with that I'll turn it over to Eric okay so as Kevin was saying one of the most important things we want to highlight with our projects today is groups where the volunteers are really on the ground participating in the effort and we're working with them kind of as a unit to look at land and look at water and think about how we can move forward in the best way and so we wanted to talk about the Windham Land Trust and we work with Windham looking at two of the streams that they have Otterbrook and Blackbrook and one of the most interesting parts of working with Windham is that they're this small group of really gung-ho awesome volunteers who do a lot of the on-the-ground work themselves and just to note that all of these small efforts have a big impact so these streams go into the Bersam Scott River which goes to are all affected by the small little projects that are going on and they're all really important and so what goes on in Windham and so the first step is the data collection so the Land Trust volunteers do all of the data collection and so we are there to facilitate them through the process to make sure the protocols and the methodologies are right that the communication with the lab is right but they do all of the sampling and so after at the end of the season they give us the, well we have the data as the season progresses we take the data we process it and we provide them with a small report that explains what their data is showing and how we can use that data moving forward to make recommendations so what exactly are they doing in Windham so one of the things that they're doing is monthly E. coli samples and so they go out and they take grab samples in their streams at designated locations and they also to dissolved oxygen monitoring with a handheld meter and so overall they've seen some issues with bacteria over the years and so they're really working hard to identify and isolate those sources and doing that on making a big effort on their own for that so just to highlight a few different projects that have gone on in Windham in both related to the water and to the land they've done some trail building at one of their Blackbrook preserve and so they've really been working to make their preserves accessible to the public and provide some education on conservation and why it's important they've also done some planting at Otterbrook and so planting along the riparian areas is good for shading, it's good for filtration, so they've focused on putting in some more vegetation trying to protect these headwater streams and the last thing they've done is they have a parcel frog hollow farm which on it contains frog hollow pond and you can see in the bottom left that it is pretty turbid and so last summer we did a small evaluation for them and they're working on trying to improve the water quality of this pond for both the biological life in the pond and also for the aesthetic pleasure of people enjoying their parcel. So the other project we wanted to touch on that is really a unique and exciting project that brings together the land and the water and really just a whole watershed approach is at Keyser Lake and with the Keyser Lake Watershed Association so if you've never been there it's absolutely beautiful and it's located, you can see in this map on the left it's located in western Maine in Lovell and it actually, you can see in this blow up on the right, I don't know if you can see that green part on the top, but it borders and it has a little bit of the White Mountain National Forest in its headwaters so that's pretty unique to have that in your watershed and so within the Keyser Lake Watershed Keyser Lake is in the center and there's three distinct basins and so we help the Watershed Association with sampling in each of those basins and taking a whole watershed approach we also work with them on sampling six of the ponds in the watershed so additionally in terms of monitoring they've been monitoring for many years now and so in the image on the right you can see this is Heinrich Wurm and he's one of the Watershed Association volunteers and does a lot of the ground work for the water quality of Keyser Lake and so that's a picture of him on a sampling day so they come out with us and we do it together and then these images here you can see we have some continuous data loggers and we've deployed these in many streams around the lake and so these are taking data every 15 minutes I just put an example here of a graph showing temperature over a season so that you can really see the fluctuations and one of the reasons I'm interested in this is that there are different land use projects going on within the watershed and so understanding the tributaries and how all of the different tributaries are contributing to the greater lake is really important and seeing that change based on land use decisions over time is really valuable so they've done years of monitoring here and monitoring is really important and exciting but they are also one of the unique parts of this project is that they are seeing change forward and so we all probably recognize that climate change is happening in Maine this is something that we're dealing with and we're facing and we're seeing not just warming temperatures but changes in precipitation and so the Keyser Lake Watershed Association really came together and they thought how are we going to protect the water at Keyser Lake and the water quality of Keyser Lake is fabulous really lucky they have great water quality and so they wanted to move forward and think how can we protect this so they formed a bunch of different partnerships and brought everybody together and they formed the climate change observatory and each of these parts plays a unique role but there are water organizations, there are land organizations there are universities and so it's a really cool program and what they're doing is they're focusing on looking forward at Keyser and thinking moving forward how can we protect our waters so this is just a snapshot from the 2015 report that we put together for them and so you can see in the bottom here this is the key and so the color is representing the condition and the arrow is representing the trend and so they're using this rich historical set of data to identify within each of the basins and the ponds not only what does it look like today but how is this data trending and so this example here is for water clarity so you can see time in years on the X axis and meters below the surface on the Y so the deeper the point the clearer the water and so for all three basins in this case Keyser has excellent water clarity and it is increasing so another thing they're doing to think about climate change in their watershed is to assess the infrastructure that they have and so last summer we worked with them on a culvert survey where we went through the watershed and we looked at all of the culverts and we tried to figure out if the infrastructure was capable of supporting a change in climate and in some cases if it was capable of handling the current climate and so if we have if we see increases in precipitation then can these culverts handle more water coming down in shorter periods of time or ecologically if we need to have better connectivity of tributaries up the watershed for cold water fish to maybe move with warmer waters is that possibility there for them so this is just one example I wanted to pull out to show how Keyser is really looking at the whole watershed and they're thinking about how everything is connected and it's really important and it's really exciting and I'm excited to see how they move forward with it so with that I will turn it back over to Kevin who will talk about Broad Cove so for this project we didn't necessarily have our hands in the water but as we know any land acquisition project is going to have an effect on water quality and this with this project we worked with the town of Cumberland and the Shabeegan Cumberland Land Trust some of you may be familiar I see Kathy's nodding her head with newspaper articles and whatnot on this this is 103 acre parcel that was known as the Payson property owned by the Payson family and the Shabeegan Cumberland Land Trust has had an easement on there since the 1990s which actually allows for subdivision of the property so what happened is this those lots are going to become housing lots but the developer took one parcel here that sort of outlined that and sold it to the town now if I understand if I remember the numbers correctly Cumberland had six miles of coastline and about 200 feet of coast access so this was a pretty exciting project for the town where they're finally going to have a nice town beach to be on but of course they'd like to do the right thing by the environment and keep things the way they are that's also mentioned in the easement that it needs to be they have to maintain water quality and whatnot so they hired us to conduct a natural resources inventory of the entire property and then makes recommendations specific to the Broad Cove Reserve when they allow public access there so as far as marine habitats go the place was pretty rich there's a nice coastline there there's both high marsh grass low marsh grass, American beach grass that's interspersed with the seaside goldenrod it's really quite pretty the northern end of the beach there has a pretty extensive clam flat there's ill grass beds just offshore and the DMR has mapped habitats just offshore there's marine worms the whole area is mapped for marine worms there's soft and hard shell clams, razor clams surf clams, blue mussels and nests on the beach and I believe that the CCLT has educational events every May and June out there which is pretty well attended for the horseshoe crabs one thing that's not on the beach that makes it good for people to access is there's no nesting birds because the tide comes up too high at high tide there's no beach left so any nests would get washed out so there's no shortage of natural resources on the property but it's not without its issues today has negatively impacted by storm water runoff and there's a well known relationship, positive correlation between increasing pervious surface and decreasing water quality and I think the town has already 10 to 15% about that impervious area in the vicinity of this property which you already start to see effects on water quality just at that level and the Department of Marine Resources also documented water quality issues at Broad Cove and at some of the tributaries going into a contained fecal coliform levels that are higher than what is acceptable so to help protect some of these natural areas we recommend that they put protective fencing around natural areas around the grass areas to minimize foot traffic and to not rip up the vegetation and we're also going to direct wading and swimming and boating away from the eel grass beds so that will be where boat moorings are going to be very carefully placed and there's actually a special type of mooring that you can use within the eel grass to keep that from getting ripped up and also limit of cutting trees for aesthetic purposes all those housing lots have view sheds that go down and we're trying to encourage not to cut too much of the trees of course because the tree canopy and the trees themselves are catching and slowing down water that's entering into the bay another thing, full disclosure I'm a dog owner, I let my dog run on the beach this has not been a well established dog walking area so we recommend that no dogs be on this beach it might have been a different story if this was people I've been going for 20 years but in this case it's not so just don't allow it off from the beginning because they're not going to catch all the dog waste that goes which can actually lead to serious issues in the clam flats the next issue was parking naturally you would want to have parking close to the beach but that's anything dripping that's impervious surface and anything coming off the car and go right into the water so as such we actually recommended and they went forward with it that they're going to put the parking lot right up along Route 88 and just have some handicap spots and a turnaround down so people are going to have to walk down to get to the water the parking line is situated way far away from the beach and there's also low impact development practices that they can use using permeable surfaces so instead of using concrete and things like that you can use other types pavers or other types of surfaces where water can infiltrate to try to keep the level of runoff after the park is built the same as it was before so and with that we'll take any questions any clarifying questions that people may have that's our field assistant and Laura Dean where that's the head of our water quality monitoring division he'll sniff anything but he won't tell you what it is we do work with sewage sniffing dogs too I didn't mention that in this talk that beach area doesn't have any nesting possibility because the water comes up already where's the water line going to be when the little increase in sea level higher you don't there's a very very very steep drop it's almost, I mean I'll hike anywhere and the drop is so steep down to the beach that it's actually hard to walk so the public really won't be able to use that beach at high tide because there's going to be nowhere to go but it's going to take a lot of sea level rise for it to come up and invade any of the property there's quite a steep bank there a teaser project I just, I find all of this really thrilling, what can I say I just, you know that people are collecting this kind of information communities are supporting the collection of this kind of information and that it has real impact on the ground the teaser project is not small and how is that being funded, I mean I see the collaborative work that was being done as sort of stage two but early on who put up the funds to enlist you folks to begin doing some pretty comprehensive work was it Lantus? It's just some pretty good grants that they've gotten and they also had some capital campaign money. The Keys are like watershed association made it rain as I understand when it comes to that I'm not intimately familiar with how they funded it but I do know and I can find out if you'd like more information so that's oh it's a watershed association separate from Lantus affiliated I guess yeah the greater level of Lantus is separate okay, gotcha so the watershed association is the primary funders great, thanks thank you well I always love coming to events like this and holding microphones there's one of my favorite things to do because I hear so many good stories and that's a theme in the work that I do around water is sharing these stories about all the good work that everybody's doing I guess that's the only button I really need to see is that one right there and we've heard this term today in the talks about headwaters headwaters to the sea and one thing I pay attention a lot to is language and in the case of all the work that you all do with Lantrus and the work you've heard about today I pretty much think we're always we're all in the same boat we're all trying to protect things that we care about land and water are linked like that when you protect land you protect water but we also face the same challenges the same frustrations and as much as I love hearing the stories of hope I spend a lot of time hearing stories of frustration as well and one of the goals of my work is how can I help people deal with those stories of frustration so they can kind of get to that reason for hope that they're working on so just like Paul said I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you then I'm going to tell you and then I'm going to tell you what I told you because that's what my boss told me to do those three things so my talk about watershed collaborations is going to link them to how we actually create landscapes of hope kind of a metaphorical landscape where when people look out they have hope for the future rather than things are always getting worse so thinking of things always getting better so I'm going to do my field is social science so the first thing I'm going to mention and talk to you about is are your mental models of the work that you do limiting your ability to create landscapes of hope and I'm going to talk about some of my mental models that have been changed as a result of my research and then I'm going to tell you about four projects that I was involved with with lots of partners and Jean I have to say I used to have Sanford in this story but when I heard I only had 15 minutes but if I had known you were going to be here Sanford would have stayed and the Salmon Falls would have been out when I saw Jean walk in I went oh I took Sanford out because the last time I told the story the Sanford conservation plan was in it so the three stories are the protecting our children's water story the Salmon Falls watershed collaborative story the sustaining the Saco estuary story right next door and then this little question of how do people value riparian buffers again focusing a little bit more on a social science lens than a biology lens so a little bit about mental models mental models are just there's structures in your brain that are used to organize information you kind of have a model of how things work you have a model of what it's like to come to a talk and listen to a power point and you kind of know what that's going to be like you have mental models of what it's like to go to a restaurant and order dinner and they make life easier it makes communication easier but the problem as Mark Twain identified a long time ago it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble it's what you know for sure that just so and that's how mental models can get you into trouble if you have a mental model of how something works or a mental model of how someone else thinks oh I know them they don't care I know them they don't know and you go from that mental model of saying well it's no use talking to them they don't care or let's give them more information because the reason they're not doing what we want is they don't have the information sometimes those mental models cause us to spend a lot of effort and a lot of time doing things that don't get us where we want to go so I've been studying mental models around water and water protection because I thought you know sometimes it's frustrating so the first time I started to study these mental models I had a background in ecology so my bachelor's degree is in zoology my master's is in coastal ecology and when I started my PhD program I said you know what I know a lot about watersheds water chemistry it's not the problem all the time sometimes the problem is the people so as much as I want to just spend my time in the middle of a salt marsh measuring marsh grass I want to have to study people so the project that I did for my PhD dissertation was called protecting our children's water and I actually heard somebody using that similar phrase during their presentation so I conducted interviews of southern Maine water managers so the cities that I studied were Bideford Wells and Kennebunk and that's where I interviewed people and I just asked the people I interviewed three simple questions I said why is water important what do you think are the things that are threatening water and what do you think can be done to protect water and the answers I got from that completely switched my mental models about how I could do a better job protecting water because when I went into the project I said well or people told me well it's no use working with municipal officials they don't really care about water they're running the town they want to save money they don't care that much about water the main thing you've got to do is educate them about water quality but after I talked to people I found out there's six major ways that these people I interviewed think about water and this is how people in southern Maine how they told me they valued water one thing they told me water is the basis for all life they understood it that way they thought everything from the smallest cell to planet and meteorology depends on water so water is life and that came out in their interviews they also said that nature makes water almost everybody understood that watersheds and forested watersheds are the source of drinking water they also said that water is a landscape feature and we could probably do an assessment of property values and find out that property next to water has a higher value and that's just having water in your backyard and this one is water is a commodity water is something that can be bottled and sold as a resource water is also something we manage through dams and other ways like irrigation and then the last model of water was water is actually waste and we depend on water to take away the waste of society and from analyzing all the data those were the six main things that came up about different ways that people value water but the thing that I was most surprised about when I talked to these southern Maine folks was their answer to how can we protect water and in talking to everyone there are eight ways in southern Maine that water is protected and I have talked to people all over the country and two other countries Canada and Mexico which aren't that far away and I've asked people after I tell them about this kaleidoscope of expertise and so far nobody has ever given me a different category from the eight that southern Maine talked about so I know it's a little bit small print but one way that water gets protected is we have regulations and we enforce the regulations a second way that water gets protected is we have land use management and planning we have different ways that land can be used a third way is through the actions of public works, engineering and wastewater their actions protect water then the whole idea of stewardship not just citizens this was the only category that someone added on I always had citizen stewardship they said you're forgetting businesses and how businesses take care of water then people take care of water through education and outreach and then the science was right here now in my work at the wells national estuarine research reserve were really heavy on the science and the science that's kind of our job at the wells reserve but if you look at the whole kaleidoscope of expertise science is just one part of protecting water then this came out as a separate function that people protecting the source of drinking water was a category and last but not least by far most people I talk to realize the role of land conservation in water and the reason I call this the kaleidoscope of expertise is depending on what kind of work you do like we have land trust people here tonight when you look at a water landscape or a watershed you have kind of a glass that you're looking through like a little kaleidoscope that when you turn it, it looks different no matter how you turn it so a land trust looks at water through a certain lens a public works director still looks at water, still has the same values but they have a little bit different lens so if you think of a kaleidoscope that changes what you see you put it all together knowing that everybody's concerned about the value of water so let me ask you a question when I say the word watershed what kind of words pop into your head as far as watershed what pops into your head just a single word water water itself, okay slopes slopes drainage filtration conservation unit two words add extra words conservation unit habitat pollution catchment what? catchment which is in Australia and Europe a watersheds often called a catchment so just that kind of thing that came to the top of your head which is a little clue about mental models southern main watersheds a lot of my work is in this yellow watershed and then this picture of a watershed if you think of the land the catchment the slopes draining down to a watershed well one thing that nobody talked about when you thought about a watershed was the human beings who are responsible for the condition of the watershed now granted the slope the sediment the native structure of the rocks determines water quality but one of the most important things that determines the condition of a watershed is the social landscape that's at work in that watershed so this is an entirely different mental model of thinking about a watershed and at least for the work I do at the wells reserve and here I focus primarily on the people in the landscape and you've heard about how people in the landscape protect water but those are the same eight categories in the kaleidoscope and every group for example the land conservation group you all are motivated and kind of your work is driven by best practices the best way to identify land prioritize it, fund it and set it aside and you're also driven by the values and ethics that drive your work well you can say the same thing about engineering and public works those folks have best practices and they also have ethics and best practices so it's the combined effort of this kind of social landscape of a watershed that leads to the values and the condition of clean water so in thinking about watershed work it's just as important to think about the social side as it is the biological side so the first story I'll tell you is about the Salmon Falls watershed collaborative and the mental model for this this project was a vision that was shared by the person in New Hampshire who is head of drinking water and the person in Maine who are head of drinking water and they were kind of challenged by the Salmon Falls watershed it's in two states and we need to figure out a way for the two states to work together but right now there's lots of barriers so the idea came up for the Salmon Falls watershed collaborative for working across that barrier of New Hampshire and Maine and I have to say when I gave this talk in Mexico they thought that was pretty funny that we had a challenge dealing with Maine and New Hampshire and this was the Tijuana watershed where there's an estuarine research reserve where 90% of the watershed is in Tijuana, Mexico and then the water comes across the state the country line into Southern California so they said oh that doesn't seem like a very big challenge but it was perceived as a challenge and you can think in your work just sometimes it's a challenge to work across town borders so there's all kinds of borders so this is the blue outline is the Salmon Falls watershed so Maine and New Hampshire it's a tributary into the Piscataqua river so then it drains into Great Bay and since a lot of my work is with estuaries that was the connection with the estuary we started working together in 2009 we had a collaborative workshop with 80 people that showed up we asked them what was important in the watershed developed this action plan and then we got an award from the American Water Works Association for the grassroots effort of bringing people together to create this action plan now this is the kind of list that I'm sure you're all familiar with but for somebody that deals with people every project has its list of stakeholders but what I find no matter what the list is these were the partners in the Salmon Falls watershed collaborative but again they all fit into the scope they all fit into one of the each categories for the kaleidoscope of expertise that Beyond Borders workshop we had was just a one-day workshop and we got people from Land Trust it's the Moose Mountain Greenways Regional Land Trust and the Great Works Regional Land Trust are the two primary land trusts that are members of this group as far as land conservation and we were also able to work with the Department of Agriculture with the funding sources they have because this is a drinking water source Summersworth and Burwick drink the Salmon Falls so there's a lot of interest around protecting the land that produces the water it's kind of a model about how the Salmon Falls watershed works and that we use this collaborative process to kind of bring people together to protect the values we all care about and deal with the threats to water quality we just had an event this summer called the Salmon Falls Success Safari and we loaded people Burwick donated a school bus and we loaded people and we started at the Headwaters, the Acton Wake Field Watershed Alliance and we came all the way down to Burwick and finished up the tour with do you know what a brownfield is it's an old industrial site hugely loaded with pollution and Burwick has multiple brownfield grants from EPA the tour eating ice cream in the ice cream shop but looking at the brownfield site next to the river that's going to be cleaned up the second story is right here in our backyard you can look right out here and see the Soco Estuary Bideford and Soco in the distance this is the Soco side Bideford on that side and the mental model in this case was if you think of coastal regions in Maine and Estuaries you might think, ah Casco Bay Penobscot Bay Cobbscook Bay, all the really wild scenic places and you wouldn't think so much about the Soco Estuary if you're up north or down east you might even look down on the little Soco Estuary and say, oh what could be happening there, what's the mental model the Estuary is only five miles long so starting right here next to campus and ending at Route 9 at the waterfalls in the middle of Bideford and Soco but through funding from NSF we did a five year study another view, here's Bideford Soco you are sitting right there and we spent five years looking at this particular Estuary it was a partnership with UNE and the Wells Reserve and we studied both the people who care for the Estuary and the plants and animals and marshes of the Estuary and we were pretty surprised by the partners and this was 20 of the partners that worked with us on the project my particular job on the project was to find the partners and keep them engaged so they could help us with our research and help us understand how their work protected the Estuary and again the same kaleidoscope of expertise matter of fact when we were gathering the stakeholders we used this, it's kind of like a one water approach but it's more specific about who are the jobs that people are doing to protect water and if you're trying to solve a hard problem make sure you've got somebody from each category in the room so that's what we did here on the Soco three of the biggest pieces of the study were looking at the salt marsh we have five miles of salt marsh Pam Morgan is our salt marsh ecologist and it's a classic textbook gradient so the salt marshes next to the mouth have full salinity just like the ocean and then the marshes up by the dams it's zero there's still tidal but there's no salt so it's a place where students can learn about that gradation and they also found a couple of rare and endangered plants that we didn't even know were right on the estuary so it's kind of a classic estuary the other thing we looked at was birds and again in each case it's a professor and student so every summer nine undergraduate students would be involved in this and we found a hundred and thirty three species of birds and I'm just talking about the marsh right next to the river they didn't go into the forest all the sampling locations were standing in the marsh and looking or listening so a hundred and thirty three species of birds using the estuarine the water and the marshes next to the next to the Soco ten percent of the state's threatened birds use this five miles twenty eight percent of species of special concern use this five miles and in a way what that might tell you as far as we studied the heck out of this little estuary and you think well how many other small estuaries things that might be in your land trust properties have the same kind of biological diversity it's just never been looked at in as much detail and then our biggest story was about fish this was combined research both the wells reserve and UNE and we sampled the salt marshes because every day at high tide fish species go up on the marsh and they eat invertebrates it's a huge feeding and nursery for young fish we looked at planktonic fish we beach sand fish and then we trawled for fish in the middle so here was the data that it really drives people crazy when we talk to the other estuaries in the state we found 60 species using the Soco at some stage of their life Penobscot has only 22 species Wells Harbor 24 Casco Bay 25 and Kenny Beck 0.27 so the diversity of species using this little estuary is very very high and then we've continued the work on this project with our partners I thought somebody from Bitterford might be here tonight so but Emily is here Emily was in my water class last year and one way we've continued to work in this watershed despite the fact that the grant itself is over is by incorporating the follow up work in regular classes so I teach a class called sustaining water and Emily was in that class and her class did a project with the Bitterford conservation commission to do education and outreach about their project on healthy lawns and also the Thatcherbrook watershed plan so that way we can keep doing this kind of work with our partners and this is kind of a different view the other ones we're looking up the estuary but for this much of an urban area to be downstream the upstream of that estuary and still have the water quality be good enough to support the biodiversity is a kind of testimony to the Clean Water Act and the work of Bitterford and Saco to clean up stormwater runoff from the town and then the last story is a project we just finished at the Wells Reserve we're looking at riparian buffers and the idea about this came from a land trust meeting Tim Smith who works at the Wells Reserve and also works with the Great Works Regional Land Trust had been doing work with land trusts for about a decade and he said you know what we need to do we need to get all the land trust people in a room and ask them what should we do for the next 10 years so we had evening workshop much like this and asked all the land trust in southern Maine to come and help us think about we said looking back so we looked at where we'd come in the past 10 years and then we said what should we do for the next 10 years and somebody spoke up from the Sanford group and said we need to talk about economics we need to talk about the money behind the choices why does it make economic sense to protect a buffer why does it make economic sense to protect land to protect water so we did a research project with Clark University on the economics of riparian buffers I am not an economist I'm an ecologist, I can hold my own with an ecologist I can hold my own with some social scientists but this was totally out of the park understanding economics environmental economics is not always about money and that was the hardest thing because I know when the land trust asked us to study this I know what they were expecting is we would get a money amount that said if you protect this buffer it will be worth x number of dollars compared to what you have to pay to filter water but economics is about human well-being it's about are you better off with this than you are with this choice and anything that makes humans better off has economic value whether or not you can put a dollar on it dollar value so these were things you've all heard about tonight the services provided by riparian buffers they're called ecosystem services or natural services so a buffer that's intact or a forest that's intact can filter pollution it can protect us from erosion it can protect us from flooding provides wildlife habitat drinking water as well as recreation and beauty and you can't always put numbers on that economists call those non-market values because they're not traded in the market and this was what we looked at in this last study so the watershed that we looked at was the Maryland River Branch Brook watershed which flows from Sanford this is the headwaters in the town of Sanford and it flows through wells and Kennebunk and then empties into the ocean right at the wells Kennebunk line where Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge and the wells reserve is so our question was do people who aren't us value riparian buffers like value a riparian buffer the services provided by a buffer and I did bring some of these if anyone wants to take a look at the end but all of these resources are on the wells reserve website I'll pass this survey around because my mental model when we created this survey Dr. Rob Johnson who's an economist he specializes in this kind of research it's called a choice experiment you spend part of the survey explaining what a buffer is then you ask people to make a choice among different choices and ask how much would you be willing to pay like if your taxes were going to go up by ten dollars and you got a benefit of more brook trout or better stream quality would you pay higher taxes so I'll pass that around it took a year to develop that survey which is about 20 pages because it's actually developed using focus groups so if you think of focus groups like testing toothpaste or toys two minutes oh yeah I'm almost near the end so the focus group helped us write this in language that anybody could understand and that survey was sent out to residents in sanford wells in kenny bunk so three very different towns with different kinds of people to help us understand how people think about water so first the survey educates people about what riparian land does and it was sent out in december of 2013 and I was sure no one would fill this out first of all it's christmas second of all the survey booklet is about 20 pages long but we got a response rate of 35 percent so of all the people so we sent out 3000 plus surveys a thousand were returned these usable statistically 35 percent and it was a random sample in kenny bunk sanford and wells and not everyone who lived in the watershed got a survey and then the other parts of the town and these were kind of the surprising results because we were interested in shoreland zoning and everyone thought that everyone hates shoreland zoning but not only did we find that people don't hate shoreland zoning that they would actually be willing to pay greater restrictions on shoreland zoning where buffers would be bigger and they were also supported more inspections and more enforcement because they're in favor of clean water quality so the other thing that I'll share this this is the results again both of these are on the wells reserve website and even when we presented the results to DEP and some of our other partners they still wouldn't believe it so rob is like he is an international expert in this kind of survey and people were still so ingrained thinking that everybody hates shoreland zoning nobody will support it that when we said actually people would support shoreland zoning so to wrap it up back to the mental models again it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble it's what you know for sure that just ain't so and so in each of our cases each time there might have been some premises there were a little bit wrong but as a result of the research we found that most people do think like we think as far as values as far as what's important but it's just oftentimes they don't know exactly what to do to take action so it's that figuring out active stewardship that's the work we're already in and just don't doubt that people are in favor of what you're working on and just proceed as if everybody's in your court and everybody's in favor of that because they might be quiet about it but you'll be surprised the support you get on projects alright thank you so thanks again all four of you for coming and presenting as Chris said it's been one of the most amazing things about getting together like this is to hear the difference stories and so now as we as we have a discussion for the next 30 minutes or so I think one one topic is really what do you as an individual or with your organization have as a goal for working with water and how does that play out in the work that you do and what do you want to create well I can share one thing yeah in Scarborough and I'm just standing because sitting is problematic at this hour yes there's food when people think of Scarborough even people in town they think it's generally in terms of yummy yeah it was a natural resource to the Martian of the Beaches which is great there's amazing beaches and the Martian of course the largest in the state and I realized that nobody was talking about the rivers which create the marsh and so that was you know I guess it was just a personal priority not only because it helped people look up which is where our primary not primary where a lot of our properties where we do a lot of partnering with but also because it was just meant to open up people's notion about natural resource values and things of value in town in addition to the marsh and the beaches which are always important to be excited about no one ever wants to be less excited about them because there's so incredible important that's just one thing I've been doing it's a very simple kind of thing but you know there are five rivers that come through Tenon I don't think that's really in people's mental map around Scarborough when they think about it because there's not a lot of drama to these rivers they're hidden, they're meandering and the marsh is flat and boring too so what's exciting there's no like drama mountain drama falls you know crashing surf unless you're on shore so I've been not exclusively but it's sort of been one thing I carry in my backpack of conversation about the town and our natural resources because it's a watery town but most people haven't been looking up from the coast the marsh is not flat and boring oh no I understand what you meant I say that it's totally about general public response it's just there's like I mean everybody knows it's just an amazing smashingly amazing place I mean everybody here mostly I guess but Jane and JoQ public who don't just on the windshield going on route one it's like oh what is this place is this a moonscape like in the winter because it's brown and flat and oh there's green and oh my goodness I'm seeing you know a white bird now so there must be something interesting going on to them all now so it's just you know it's not like the Proudsnack or a beach or you know a cave yet it's a drama of a different kind that's not typically American I have a question I'd like to throw out we've talked about the value of forested land in watersheds for lakes what's the value of forested land on the upper edge of the salt marsh can somebody help me with that if it's not much higher place the marsh and move into when sea level rises well we understand that I will have a waterfront home if I leave that bump but that's not going to happen and secondly it's a right herring that would buffer much as it would be on the river you're in the slightest but your mouth is full sorry with a full mouth but no that would buffer that's a water resource right there the marsh I mean the marsh itself filters water but any additional land leading up to that it's only bonus for more water filtration and I'm not an expert on marsh wildlife maybe Dr. Fort there you are you may know with any other wildlife species that require that distance to be kept away that won't use the salt marsh I think that's the bird data the 133 species of birds because it was including the forested areas adjacent to the marsh because only a couple species actually build their nest in the marsh the other birds that are feeding their nest are in the forest yes there is some impact there is some interest in maybe changing some of the forested upland areas of the marsh and I'm just trying to understand what the risk in that is such as marsh front homes no not necessarily marsh front homes but some other issues habitat management yeah more habitat management sort of thing do you know what they're trying to manage for like creating openings to have cotton fields oh yeah we go out and we heavily monitor that areas that we do habitat restoration we have a very good relationship with the landowners because a lot of times their view shed is right on the marsh and we do a lot of work where you can see the marsh in that land at some economic price but of course we look at it as we've got people here who really enjoy their view shed we have to work really closely with them to see what they value as Chris and everyone else has said but how can we help them understand that as a federal agency we have values that we also want to see move forward and so when we do habitat restoration we have volunteers come out so we're publicly educating people who come out with us we are enforcing and we're making sure that the relationship with the landowner is fostered as well and so that relationship to us is very important anyone who sees habitat restoration going on we encourage them and they don't know what it is or they're worried about it we encourage them to come talk to us and the refugee manager Rachel Carson because we have 5600 acres from Kittery Point all the way up until Cape Elizabeth and we manage those areas pretty not heavily but we do do a lot of habitat restoration and like I said before water is not our primary concern that habitat restoration for our endangered species and a lot of them include shorebirds they include birds that nest in marshes and so that value of the land is maybe economically I don't know specifically but from a wildlife habitat perspective it's pretty important for these birds and the content that we try and manage although we haven't seen too many no we haven't either provided that there's a big difference in clearing a patch of forest and putting a home there versus clearing it for habitat management I understand and presumably they would not be they would be looking at the area that the forest does not have any wildlife that is dependent that is of special concern or rare that using that particular forest type I'm assuming that would be done before if we don't clear forest area for habitat management a lot of people who want to develop or something like that they come to us and they say hey can you do an ecological assessment or something or they go to a different organization and say can you please help us out and figure out can we do this here can we not are very willing to work with us it's really inspiring for us especially younger people coming into this field that is not so friendly sometimes it's helpful for us to kind of foster those relationships and like he said there is a significant difference between clearing an area for development versus habitat management and then the processes that we go through are different also are there other groups that are getting into either water based programming or are interested in doing programming around water bringing out to partners experiences to share again this is small but I'll just put it out there in the sort of idea department again just it's less about sort of conservation than education I suppose but I I realized that there's spring rush every spring and who goes to look at spring rush nobody goes I mean some people do but in the spring in the spring when snow melt and the rivers are rushing when water is high in the spring and there's some really exciting things that can be seen in early spring as people who are out of the land and yet again Jane and Joe do public don't don't necessarily know that it's happening number two it can be pretty cool to look at number three never see it because they don't go to it so we had a spring rush walk this year to go to a couple of places in town that had some cool viewing spots again more around connecting people you know it's sort of neat to see but also connecting people to the water in their world where it is and what's happening with it around here so I just you know that's just another sort of land and water where is it what's happening during the year one of the things that we thought about in preparing for this gathering is use of citizen science and the efforts that are being made across the state by individual professors or organizations to work on some particular data collection that might involve people working in their own communities we actually have a handout of a variety of resources around that this idea of doing the water monitoring across a watershed collecting data in different streams and rivers and it seems like kind of really an easily accessible approach to connecting both with water but also this idea of stewardship and sort of how do we really own what's happening and really understand it even more deeply and some of these projects can be done at all ages and can be done in sort of creative ways the most recent one being the Friends of Casco Bay was it a nitrogen nabbing nitrogen on one day at the same time there were a number of sites across the bay where people took a water quality test and so that brings in a whole bunch of data and it provides an opportunity for communication it's a blast of some kind there were articles about it stories on the radio just main calling on Monday was about citizen science and I know that Maine Audubon does some some citizen work we have probably about 100 volunteers for every staff person at Maine Audubon we have about 2,000 citizen scientists on an average year and that involves things from the Brooktrout surveys to the lead sinker work that we do we couldn't do what we do with staff we would just be absolutely just stalled and so we require a tremendous network of volunteers to provide us not only on an individual site but collectively throughout the state we really start to see that landscape fabric of what was going on as it relates to species culverts and all the wildlife work that we do involves water if you think about the iconic species of Maine again the Brooktrout the common loon, the moose, the lobster the Atlantic Puffer they're all water based species so we can't do obviously we can't protect wildlife we can't protect habitat without high quality water so they all go hand in hand and all of our volunteers are working with water themselves whether it's the pipe flow or salise turns everything is regarding that quality watershed in one way or another what's cool is that's a Maine state wide project but to think about individual organizations coming up with a question about something in your region, something in your town in your marsh you know and having the idea there's a you can actually set up your own kind of projects with vital science which is a website we have it, it's the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, we have some information on it here but just this idea of another kind of access point at all different levels an interesting anecdote on the Nabbing Nitrogen project which was originally conceived as both shore based and floating things they canceled the because the weather was canceled the floating part of it but I think there were 130 sites there were 30 or 50 floating sites and those filled up and the anecdote is that people with boats just are dying to do something useful with them, they want to play with them but doing it for a purpose makes it really as if you can leverage that on a marsh or a lake or on a bay think about the boat I was wondering about what's the average age of a person who uses land trust land and the reason I say that is that we do something called Drinking Water Week is a one week celebration of drinking water I'm sure you all have it marked on your calendar every year but anyway we do some events every year to try to bring the public in and we do a plant tour which I know sounds very exciting but anyway we don't get a lot of people and they tend to be the average of 60 most of them except for we do bring in some birds of prey and that brings a lot of parents bring their kids but anyway we talked to some of our younger staff and said we can't get anybody your age to come to any of these events what do you think we should do and one person said why don't you do a tour of breweries and she's 30 and she said if you did a tour of breweries and said these are all breweries I might go to that and it sounds sort of almost silly but this Pokemon girl I bet you if you had sites that were on your land trust land you'd suddenly see dozens and dozens of people under the age of 30 on the land I'm not proposing that I don't know how to do it but I think trying to find things that would I bet if you said well we want to do citizen science and have people come and collect samples everybody would be in their 60s and 70s and there'd be lots of dedicated people and they're key I'm sure to the land trust health but how do you engage I'm not sure I don't have an answer it's a question they know that it's been doing some things over the years and the price can probably share more but they've been doing some things around linking technology with the outdoors neither one exclusively but helping to make that bridge in some programs that they put together and might want to be in touch with them to learn more we're trying to use social B and more what are the different ways that people were younger what avenues are they already using in terms of communicating in terms of understanding their world and how can we be in that framework in some way shape or form and in some cases the networks, the historical networks aren't even where people kind of in that kind of millennial generation they're not even looking there to begin with I think Facebook is a very long past we used to look at yeah, or Snapchat or Snapchat and so we're already I know a lot of organizations they're saying we have to have Facebook thing and we have to do kids aren't even looking at that anymore my kids just roll their eyes to Facebook well even at the citizen science program that was on the radio the other day I think someone used the language flash mob for some of the citizen science data collection when you think about it that's really what these at the same time sampling projects really are so I'm thinking about Chris's work and language in fact compared to the scale I've wanted to ask how many Jane and Joe Q Publix know what a riparian buffer even is you know, I have to be reminded actually so there's a lot of language and communication tools are huge pieces of the picture this is just for the scientists in the room speaking about water as a homeowner I wish real hard if you try to sell a property on uranium in your water radon and arsenic as you're doing tests in nature do you find those ingredients in the water? well I used to work at the drinking water program so that was dealing with public water around the whole state but also private wells and the main geological survey tested thousands of wells 30% of wells in Maine have a natural level of arsenic that exceeds what's considered safe for drinking water but of course there's no requirements that private wells be tested for arsenic so many people don't realize that their water is high in arsenic reason why you hear about radon uranium and arsenic is because you're in Maine and those happen to be elements that are found in Maine bedrock and therefore if they're in bedrock in other states there would be other contaminants or metals of concern so that's why you hear about those three but that doesn't impact you working your work on surface water there are some things like radon is a groundwater concern but not a surface water concern because it would just go into the atmosphere so we're required to test for all those things but subago lake just doesn't have them so for surface waters there are other contaminants of concern but groundwater those are particular in Maine and particular groundwater with FBE's monitoring projects we don't deal a lot with drinking water it's mostly surface water and keeping the water clean for wildlife and for people to be able to swim in and things like that and so for that we'd be looking at you're always looking at dissolved oxygen salinity conductivity which gives you an idea of what the salt content is of the water if it shouldn't be there it should be fresh and it's getting run off on the road but then we also test for things like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons gasoline all sorts of contaminants like that but not so much the naturally occurring poisons that you do want to test for if you have a well water thank you are there other land trusts here who either have formally participated in the citizen science project either initiated by yourself or partnering with somebody else who's leading or members of your land trust that you know are participating in citizen science of any sort well act and wake the watershed a lot there's a lot of it in fact today they had a youth kayak you know go out and do they have what is it the mobile that comes and does uh like testing the water they have these little cones they wrap and take you know vital science created a project for the trails for invasives but it didn't really get too much involvement I think like 10 posts and it's kind of wither away since then what's vital science for people who don't know what it is it's with uh gulf main research institute host of vital science in some place to host citizen science projects and there are professor scientists who are attached to it also and can answer questions and we have a handout here and you can get more information there we also sent this out with our follow up email so you have all these links one of the recent issues of conservation biology deals with citizen science my first exposure to citizen scientists was having volunteers and training them how to like this is how you do it this is how it must be done turn in the data this way but actually it's um the first article in the issue citizen science has actually been really useful is that people think outside of the box is that people in their various fields get sort of like they have the way that they think and actually I can't remember the exact example but it was an astrological discovery based on from citizen science because someone was looking at something and most of the astronomers weren't looking at it and so it's not only just to collect the data but it's also very useful when people are doing this in citizen science is that we care what you think too it's not just so you can give us the data and we can do what we do but it's a good way to make discoveries my favorite story on this is about lobster life history and Diane Conway founded the Lobster Conservancy and Friendship had a PhD in Lobster Life History Woods Hole and there was a gap nobody knew where the Lobsters were between the time they settled out from a planktonic stage until they were big enough to crawl into traps and she was launching her kayak she was draining her kayak out of each of her tires on this coast in Parkesville and she happened to buy a couple of kids who were turning over a lobster nest around the beach and she said we were playing with baby lobsters like Dad does all day and that's where the Lobsters were and she developed an entire citizen science program of monitoring juvenile lobsters in load to load over time and based on that one experience they never asked a lot of the kids that's a great example so we need to wrap up because it's now seven but I didn't want to just hear if we could do sort of a popcorn or go around the room you're a thought about a question that you have about integrating water or connecting water and land a question you might have about any of our presenters information or a big picture or an idea that you think might bring a bunch of different groups together to do again to address a bigger problem together as opposed to on our own so if people could you know think of some ideas and it may get to also why you came to this presentation a question that you may still have in your mind I think for myself you guys may not have on enough as I mentioned there's obvious relationship between wildlife habitat and water I think to a large extent it was really around what brought me here to is also just kind of the idea just the process because I think that we're all dealing with the same set of constraints in terms of trying to reach broader audiences what's most impactful to different audiences and how do we bring people together to address these problems and I think that those running themes are the same for all of us and I just encourage to hear kind of how those different those battles are being fought so to speak by smart people and I would love to be a part of listening and being a part of that dialogue I think those are the things that I know we grapple with all the time and there's a ways that we can maximize that impact I'd like to figure out how to get that done and where those economies of scale where those opportunities to share information because I think at the end of the day it's about how do you maximize the impact and I think all of us are very similar spirit about what that can be done I get an iPhone 2 event like this this to me there's always the question of scale and that's really something that I think a lot about and doing a lot of work with water sometimes I get stuck in that perspective as Kevin's saying of like okay here in the mountains I can draw a watershed and that's my scale so how do you bring together thousands of volunteers from the Audubon and those five or so rivers in Scarborough that people don't know about and work together because that's all important I just think this is a neat cool group for that scale is something I wrestle with a lot it's like you want to do a big project but how do you get everybody involved and maybe what you really need to do is think about the little projects and start to get people involved the little projects that maybe in time grow into bigger ones I'm a great advocate of grassroots citizen science we're just simple voluntary picking up trash on shorelines and river banks doing very simple flipping and basing plants things that educates many people make them aware such as exploring the five rivers and having a program to walk the five rivers with some sort of simple limit you end up with every one of those volunteers as they become supporters whatever limit equals lives they can't drive down the highway a statewide would be a resource for citizen science volunteers if there's a statewide project they're like aiding someone on land trust but apart from that are there many folks are there many land trusts working on watershed scale projects or even watershed in partnerships in a watershed about or for the watershed you know municipal boundary stuff we are three rivers is working on three rivers we have we have the salmon falls the mouse and river and the asope which goes into the and so we are and we're right now we need ten thousand dollars from every single one of you because we have to raise a lot of money because we're working on a two thousand acre block owned by six people and covers both all three of those watersheds essentially you know it's really and from the very start we just at our last meeting had a little review we're like trying to think of the stories and we asked one of our founding members to just come up with what how do we start what happened then and you know we got together with tinsmith and we got Southern Maine Regional Planning to help us vision and we had community meetings and we talked about one of the things was this go hill to shatley pond project which now we are actually launching but now we've got one thousand six hundred and sixty-six dollars every day hundred and sixty-six days I don't know how we can do it so if anyone has any ideas but this land she speaks about I think those big television screens on either side of the wall framing it are lakes that are very near the land and it's interesting how the special interest groups it has a bad ring to it but it's very vital the homeowners there and the lake associations have really stepped up they have already in our brief meetings because we really are just getting it off the ground we've had pledges of ten thousand dollars we've had pledges of five thousand dollars so to answer some of the points here I think the population some spots is spot on about the water and these folks are helping us as best they can it's just an interesting it's a little interesting area there where that's a special interest group but maybe we have to now go around all of our towns that we service in our land trusts and see if we can raise the money we're not professional fundraisers we have to watch that kind of volunteerism it's like sort of hanging yourself out there to say to a stranger would you be kind enough I don't know you well but we are going to do something with a watershed could you participate and if we are successful it's truly a home run for the entire topic here it's just a fabulous home run so end of story which I love the landscape of hope it's just this idea we're trying we certainly are addressing problems but really to get people around the table and to feel like we're moving forward we want to create that vision of where we're going instead of the landscape of hope bringing water into the conversation is really important so thank you very much I'm sorry about the traffic thank you all thank you to the presenters for building out the context of this presentation so I really appreciate that and we'll see you again enjoy your summer