This Spring I will be working with the Falmouth Audubon, contributing to a few projects they currently have underway there. Annica Mcquirk, Audubon Project coordinator and Unity alum, is currently overseeing aspects of the Audubon Brook Trout Survey, Wildlife Roadwatch, and other citizen science initiatives. I will be collaborating with Annica to log and review survey data, organize volunteers, and administer project webpages. I have volunteered with the Maine chapter in the past, and spent a couple years working on these very same projects. The surveys have evolved and grown, and it's awesome to see how much progress has been achieved throughout all of them.
For a little background on these projects, I'll quote some descriptions from Audubon's Brook Trout survey page. The survey itself has been divided into two titles: The Remote Pond Survey and The Coastal Stream Survey. The remote pond survey is described as "A collaborative effort by Maine Audubon, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (MDIFW) and the Maine Council of Trout Unlimited (METU). The goal is to recruit volunteers to identify previously-undocumented wild Brook Trout populations in remote Maine ponds. Maine contains over 6,000 lakes and ponds, and close to 1,000 of those waters had never been surveyed by fisheries biologists prior and have no records of any past stocking." The Coastal Stream survey is similar in nature, and described as "A collaborative effort by Maine Audubon, MDIFW, METU, and most recently the Sea Run Brook Trout Coalition (SRBTC), the Coastal Stream Survey is a separate project that was added in 2014 to recruit volunteer anglers to gather data on wild Brook Trout in Maine’s coastal rivers and streams. Brook Trout that live in coastal streams may spend part of their lives in saltwater and come back to freshwater to spawn, a life history strategy called “diadromy.” Currently, the distribution and life history of coastal Brook Trout in Maine is poorly understood. Diadromous populations of Brook Trout appear to be declining throughout their range. There has never been an intensive survey of Maine’s coastal Brook Trout populations, so their current status in Maine is uncertain. Data collected by volunteers will be provided to biologists to inform future fisheries management decisions."
The Maine Audubon Wildlife Road Watch is a "web-based map and database designed to record your observations of road-side and road-killed wildlife.
Information about where wildlife attempt to cross roads, what animals are involved, on what kinds of roads are collisions frequent, and other data can help inform policy, management, and financial investment in reducing road-kill and habitat fragmentation. Maine Audubon scientists will use the data to improve our collective understanding of where wildlife attempt to cross roads and what we can do to reduce road-kill and increase safety for people and wildlife."
We are starting on reviewing a backlog of data, and have discussed other opportunities arising in March and April.
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