SERC Campus Renewal is Underway Wednesday, February 03, 2010 The buildings have stood for decades, the changes have been anticipated for months, and the demolition took a day…well, a day for one building and a couple of days for others.  Schoodic Education and Research Center, once a Navy installation and now a National Park Service Research Learning Center, is undergoing a transformation that will make its facilities more accessible, functional and green. The plan for change is ambitious, but it is moving forward as scheduled, despite the weather and the surprises that construction projects often bring.   Right now, two teams are working on the major projects: Ganneston Construction (Augusta) has begun updating and expanding Schooner Commons (our main dining facility), while Soderberg Co. Inc. (Caribou) is tackling the demolition of fourteen buildings, including the old barracks, pictured at right. The gymnasium was the first major demolition, beginning in mid-January. It was awe-inspiring to watch the excavator appear to "chomp" sections of cinderblock and corrugated steel, tugging and twisting like some mechanized predator shaking morsels free.  We also observed, as the roof came off, that there were no pieces of insulation board or fiberglass batting to be seen.  It was suddenly clear why the building once consumed more than 9,000 gallons of fuel oil a year. Read full article: 'SERC Campus Renewal is Underway' (3052 bytes more)

2nd Saturday Lecture: The Downeast Institute and Its Impact on Eastern Maine Wednesday, February 03, 2010 Dr. Brian Beal, professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine at Machias, has recently won a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant of $600,000 for the Downeast Institute for Applied Marine Research on Great Wass Island.  The funding will assist in the construction of a state-of-the-art center at the Institute and in curriculum development for a Downeast coastal studies concentration for UMM students.  What will these projects mean for the coastal communities in Downeast Maine? On Saturday, February 13, Dr. Beal will share a vision for this new facility and its future as he describes “The Downeast Institute: Creating New Educational and Economic Opportunities in Eastern Maine” as part of the “Second Saturday” lectures at Moore Auditorium on the campus of Schoodic Education and Research Center in the Schoodic District of Acadia National Park, Winter Harbor.  The lecture will begin at 7pm, is open to the public and admission is free. Read full article: '2nd Saturday Lecture: The Downeast Institute and Its Impact on Eastern Maine' (2435 bytes more)

Summer Intern Opportunities Wednesday, February 03, 2010 Acadia Partners is looking for college students interested in a summer internship as roving science reporters covering research and other natural, cultural, and social science activities at parks within the Northeast Region of the National Park Service (NPS). Interns will work with staff from Acadia Partners and the NPS to create reports and summaries of research projects and science programs conducted at Acadia National Park and other parks in the region. This work will involve reading scientific reports, working with researchers and staff (including participating in fieldwork) to clarify details and focus, writing summaries, editing images, creating graphics, and designing layouts for online and print publications. Interns will also be asked to author and maintain a regular weblog about their observations and insights on science and nature in the parks they visit. Read full article: 'Summer Intern Opportunities' (1149 bytes more)

Students and Graphs Tuesday, February 02, 2010 The "Acadia Learning" program is the outreach program at SERC that works with teachers across Maine to engage them and their students in science that is connected to research here at the park and at the Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research, our partner organization at the University of Maine. This past weekend we conducted a workshop with teachers from Scarborough, Old Town, Mt. View, and Nokomis high schools to introduce some new thinking we have done in the area of helping students work with graphs.  Graphs are important because they are a way for students to express their understanding of what is going on in the streams, forests, and fields that they study. They are also a tool that teachers can use to see how students use data that they collect to develop that understanding. Over the past three years of looking at students' graphs and poster presentations as part of the Acadia Learning project, we have observed that many students seem confused about how to express their findings on a graph.  The problems go beyond simple graph mechanics -- titles, labels, and the like.  A lot of graphs just don't seem to make sense in ways that we would expect.  So, over the past year we developed the first version of a written diagnostic tool to probe student understanding, and misunderstanding, of how to organize and present their findings.  The workshop this past weekend introduced teachers to the tool and engaged them in a day-long discussion about students, graphs, and data. Read full article: 'Students and Graphs' (7146 bytes more)

Engaging Students in Real Scientific Work Tuesday, January 05, 2010 Just before the holiday season this year Acadia Partners Executive Director Bill Zoellick and Dr. Sarah Nelson, of the University of Maine's Mitchell Center, traveled to the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco to present a paper describing SERC's Acadia Learning Project, which engages teachers and student researchers in a citizen science program that collects data about the mercury burden in dragonfly larvae and other biota across a region spanning the coast of Maine. The Acadia Learning project is differentiated from other research in its focus on engaging students in authentic research, collecting data of real interest to research scientists, while also providing a high quality education experience.  We have learned that these two goals -- collecting useful data and providing a rich educational experience -- often pull a project's implementation in different directions.  Our project, funded in part by the Maine Department of Education, is both educational research and geochemical research. Read full article: 'Engaging Students in Real Scientific Work' (5022 bytes more)

Phenology Research Secures Additional Funding Tuesday, January 05, 2010 This past summer, Acadia Partners provided a research fellowship to Dr. Abe Miller-Rushing to support his work at SERC in developing ways to engage volunteers in phenology -- the study of seasonal biological events such as leaf out, migration, and reproduction.  At Acadia, Dr. Miller-Rushing involved a number of different kinds of volunteers in collecting information about both plants and animals in the park. We funded this work as a pilot study.  Our goal was to provide early support for Dr. Miller Rushing and is colleagues at the USA National Phenology Network so that they could develop their ideas and -- hopefully -- seek additional, more substantial funding.  We have just learned that Dr. Miller-Rushing and his colleagues have successfully secured additional support from the US Geological Survey for the next three years.  We congratulate them, and look forward to working with them over the coming summers. Read full article: 'Phenology Research Secures Additional Funding' (2046 bytes more)

2nd Saturday Lecture: Federal Fishing Regulations and the Fish on Your Dinner Plate Monday, January 04, 2010 Fisherman-scholar Ted Ames, whose innovative fisheries research was recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship known as the “genius” award, and Aaron Dority, Director of the Downeast Groundfish Initiative at Penobscot East Resource Center, will speak at the Schoodic 2nd Saturday Lecture Series on Saturday, January 9th at 7:00 p.m. at the Moore Auditorium on the campus of the Schoodic Education and Research Center. The Penobscot East Resource Center’s mission is to secure a future for the fishing communities of Eastern Maine through programs in leadership development, community-based science and resource management, education, and advocacy. Ames and Dority will speak about the Downeast Groundfish Initiative, a program to rebuild a sustainable groundfishery. A key feature of this is the recent creation of a permit bank which preserves legal access to the cod, haddock and flounder fishery for community fishermen. There are very few federal permits still available to Maine fishermen and without them, community fishermen will be prohibited access to the fishery when it recovers. By banking permits, much the way a land trust conserves land, the rights that attach to them can be made available to local fishermen who would otherwise be excluded from ever fishing again. Read full article: '2nd Saturday Lecture: Federal Fishing Regulations and the Fish on Your Dinner Plate' (1570 bytes more)

Acadia Partners Welcomes New Executive Director Thursday, December 17, 2009 In its regular board meeting on December 8, 2009, the Acadia Partners Board of Directors accepted Denny O'Brien's resignation as Acadia Partners' Executive Director. Alan Goldstein, Board Chairman, said, "Denny did a great job of launching Acadia Partners and we've been extremely pleased with the job he's done. We wish him all the good luck as he goes forth in his next endeavor. We're going to miss him." The board appointed Bill Zoellick to serve as the organization's new Executive Director. In announcing Mr. Zoellick's appointment, Mr. Goldstein said, "This is a time of change and growth for Acadia Partners and SERC. Over the next two years we will rebuild the campus, and SERC will become the place that we envisioned back when the Navy left Winter Harbor years ago. We are very fortunate to have a person with strong business and program experience--who is already on our staff and familiar with our operations and mission--who can lead the organization through this next chapter." Mr. Zoellick said, "SERC is moving from idea to reality. It is breaking new ground--not only literally, in terms of new construction--but also as a public-private partnership that can create new ways to achieve the mission that the Park Service identified when it created the Research Learning Center network. I feel very fortunate to have the chance to do this kind of important work and am honored to have the Board’s support." Bill Zoellick has prepared a more complete statement about the changes, challenges, and opportunities that Acadia Partners faces; the statement is available on the Acadia Partners website.

Naming Nature Friday, November 27, 2009 Naming is a way of knowing something. When fifth and sixth graders come here to the Schoodic Education and Research Center they learn, among other things, how to recognize spruce trees. If you say "Ouch!" when you shake hands with the tree, it's a spruce. Knowing that a tree is a spruce, and that another is a balsam, and yet another is a birch, and a fourth is a maple -- rather than all just being plain old "trees" -- gives a child a way of seeing a forest differently. Naming creates connection. (It is probably one reason that farmers raising pigs for slaughter generally call them "Pig" rather than "Charlie.") Carol Kaesuk Yoon, who has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Cornell and who writes for Science Times for the New York Times, has written a new book about our human impulse to order the world by naming it. It has the title Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (W.W. Norton, 2009). (Go to the Northeast Park Science Blog for the rest of the story.)

Transforming the SERC Campus Wednesday, November 04, 2009 Over the next 18 to 24 months the Schoodic Education and Research Center campus will become a different place, with a different "feel" and capable of supporting new kinds of programs. As Acadia Superintendent Sheridan Steele puts it, we will compress ten years of transformation into two. Some buildings will be remodeled and repurposed, other buildings will be removed, roads will be rerouted, and the campus will become greener in all senses of the word. Next summer the entire campus will be buzzing with construction work. Packing this much change into a short period of time has required a great deal of planning, involving everything from overall campus design to the kinds of tables we will have in new laboratory spaces. At 7 PM on Saturday, November 14 Supt. Steele will come to Moore Auditorium to describe these plans and talk about the way that the campus will be transformed. Behind all of these changes, of course, are the programs that we run at SERC -- programs that the new campus is designed to support. To provide an overview of these programs, Supt. Steele will be joined by Kate Petrie ("Ranger Kate") who, who runs the Schoodic Education Adventure program at SERC, and Bill Zoellick of Acadia Partners, who works with park staff to develop programs focused on scientific research and teacher professional development. Read full article: 'Transforming the SERC Campus' (868 bytes more)

    1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11   >