This story appears as part of a collaboration to strengthen investigative journalism in Maine between the BDN and The Maine Monitor. Read more about the partnership.
Ten wetland restoration projects will receive $4.6 million from the Maine Natural Resource Conservation Program, including funding for a project in Acadia National Park to improve the park’s largest freshwater wetland, which has seen extensive flooding in recent years, and money to remove dams on the Royal and Nezinscot rivers in Yarmouth.
“The diversity of projects is what’s most exciting for me as we look forward to seeing these implemented,” said Bryan Emerson, a mitigation program manager with The Nature Conservancy, which administers the program along with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The funding pool and number of projects are more than double that of last year, which saw $1.2 million granted to three projects. The increase is in part due to funds that rolled over from an earlier funding round, when a change in the program resulted in a high number of rejected proposals, likely because not all applicants understood the switch, said Dawn Hallowell, a regional director for the DEP.
Money for the fund comes from developers who pay into the state’s In Lieu Fee Compensation program, which allows them to purchase credits to compensate for any effects their projects have on natural resources rather than undertake mitigation efforts on their own. MNRCP has awarded over $36 million for conservation and restoration projects since 2008.
The money from the sale of credits is pooled in a dedicated fund for each region of the state.
“If impacts are happening in Southern Maine, we want to keep the mitigation and the restoration work happening in Southern Maine,” said Emerson. “And same with Northern Maine. If any impacts are happening in Northern Maine, we want to make sure that we’re mitigating where the impacts are happening.”
Emerson said the MNRCP benefits Maine’s natural resources by targeting conservation and restoration projects where they’re most needed.
“It pools money from lots of different smaller impacts and allows us to fund bigger, more substantial projects,” he said.
One of those projects involves a $308,000 grant for restoration of the Great Meadow, a 100-acre wetland near downtown Bar Harbor, money that will aid the National Park Service in replacing an undersized culvert at the meadow’s outlet with a larger passage. This is the first time MNRCP has funded a project in Acadia.
The wetland was significantly altered more than a century ago by Acadia National Park co-founder George Dorr, who built a dam upstream along with roads, bridges and trails, all of which interrupted the flow of water, according to the Schoodic Institute, one of the partners in the restoration project, along with the Wabanaki and Friends of Acadia.
Those changes, coupled with a changing climate and heavier precipitation — which has increased in the park by roughly six inches per year since its founding — have caused extensive flooding in recent years as degraded soils have been unable to absorb the excess water and heavy rains have overwhelmed the culvert.
The flooding has extended to the Sieur de Monts area of the park, including a parking lot, nature center and native plant garden, submerging parts of a popular boardwalk. The altered flow and flooding has also shifted the kinds of plants that grow in the wetland, favoring those that can tolerate disturbed conditions, including invasives such as glossy buckthorn, according to Friends of Acadia.
Replacing the culvert, along with restoring and widening the stream above the wetland, will help it withstand flooding, said Lauren Gibson, the Wild Acadia Coordinator for Friends of Acadia, and will direct water away from infrastructure, like the nature center and trails, during floods.
Other projects funded this round include efforts to restore eelgrass in the Great Salt Bay, which has seen dramatic declines in recent years, according to Maine Public; plans to improve the degraded salt marsh around the York River; upgrading a culvert to a bridge on a tributary of the Aroostook River; and a project to reestablish wetlands along the Upper Magalloway River.
Mainers benefit in multiple ways from the conservation program, said Hallowell of the DEP.
“The resources win because we’re getting permanent protection, we’re making the situation better for the resources and the environment,” Hallowell said. ”And we’re making communities better by [creating] those publicly accessible spaces.”
