Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Maine
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The value of natural landscape features is not necessarily reflective in their size, and some small features play a significant role in maintaining biodiversity or providing ecosystem services. Conserving these features and the functions they provide while developing tools that help reconcile property rights and rules of environmental protection across scales and jurisdictions provides novel opportunities for resource management. Seasonally inundated wetlands (vernal pools) are a model system to study the dynamics of small natural feature management. This project is a collaboration of the University of Maine, US Geological Survey Maine Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Clark University, and Bowdoin College. This project brings together a team of ecologists and economists from multiple sub-disciplines and institutions to explore the biophysical and socioeconomic components of one type of small natural feature, vernal pools, as a coupled-systems model for management of these features; improve strategies for conserving vernal pools and other small natural features with large significance; and create novel and cutting-edge research, training, and educational experiences.