Description: Dengue, a mosquito-borne virus, has spread across the globe in recent years, now infecting an estimated 100-400 million people each year. Approximately forty percent of the world’s population lives in countries with a risk of dengue.
Description: Developing our arboretum creates more records for future students to refer to, to analyze our campus inventory over time. Our current arboretum contains around 150 different species of woody specimens
Description: Maine has over 6,000 lakes and ponds. These waterbodies are home to a wide range of wildlife and plant species. Maintaining high water quality in Maine’s lakes and ponds is essential to protect the health of these habitats and the species that use them.
Description: Roads often intersect the habitat between forests and wetlands, leaving migrating amphibians with no choice but to cross the road. Unfortunately, many amphibians are killed by vehicles when they migrate across roads. These animals' small size and slow movements make them difficult to see from a car.
Description: Under the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) 's, cheetahs are listed as vulnerable. This status means the species is likely to become endangered unless the circumstances threatening its survival and reproduction of the species improve. Due to recent studies showing a significant decline in current cheetah numbers, scientists have started calling for the species to be up-listed to endangered status under the IUCN.
Description: Mount Desert Island, located off the east coast of Maine, is completely surrounded by intertidal environments. Throughout the 1900s, data was collected and recorded in notebooks regarding intertidal life by numerous researchers, followed by entry into a spreadsheet by Michael Hays, a citizen scientist who worked with the MDIBL (Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory). In present day, these data can be put into a map thanks to ArcGIS Pro. These data includes large amounts of information regarding marine life around the coastal environments of MDI, such as species common and Latin names, locations observed (where on the island along with Lat. and Long.), observation year, along with some brief notes about each observation. [show more]
Description: The goal of this project was to identify birding hotspots on Mount Desert Island. To do this, I used data from eBird to determine which birds are most common in each sector. The sectors are areas used by birders during the annual Christmas Bird Count . Birding hotspots are areas that birders go to frequently
Description: The Common Loon (Gavia immer) has historically been used as an indicator species during it's summer breeding season. More specifically, loons have been used as an indicator for heavy metals, biocontamination, and acidity (Canadian Lakes Loon Survey).
Description: An estimated 73 million sharks were killed last year, primarily for their fins. Their populations are at critical levels, and they are still being fished out of the oceans at unsustainable rates. Some regional populations of shark species are down to 95 - 99%, which is considered functional extinction.
Description: The USDA reported a shortage of veterinarians in at least 500 counties spanning 44 states. This shortage is mostly in rural areas and therefore has a larger effect on large animals and livestock. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) reported that only 10% of graduates had an interest in working with livestock.
Description: Pollinators such as wild bees and the Western honeybee, Apis mellifera, are important to humans and nature. Seventy-five percent of food crops and 90% of wild flowering plants benefit from animal pollinators (IPBES 2016).
Description: Songbirds use islands for breeding and migrating. Great Duck Island is located 10 miles from Mount Desert Island, Maine; it is about 200 acres large and consists of a variety of habitat types.
Description: Exploring the Past to Build a Resilient Future To understand how climate change is affecting Mount Desert Island we need to look to the past. Our ancestors documented the natural world around them in stories, reports, journals, diaries, and letters, which are cared for in the collections of history museums and libraries. Increasingly, scientists are pulling observations and data from historic records to get a clearer picture of the natural world of the past to understand how the present is changing. [show more]
Description: Great Duck Island (GDI) is a 91-hectare island lying 13 kilometers south of Mount Desert Island in the Gulf of Maine. GDI has a long history of human occupation, and has been farmed, grazed, and lived upon since the early 19th century. Today, approximately 85 hectares of the island are co-owned by TNC and the state of Maine and has been managed as a preserve since 1985. There is a small private inholding on the north end of the island, and the remaining five hectares are owned by the College of the Atlantic (COA). COA manages the Alice Eno Field Station out of the light station on the south end of the island, where students have conducted regular research on the ecology of the island since 1999 (Anderson 2018) [show more]