The University of Maine’s School of Forest Resources recently finished an innovative remote sensing application for the town of Orland. The Barbara Wheatland Geospatial Programs’ aerial monitoring team produced a high-resolution orthophoto — an aerial photograph that has been geometrically corrected to have a uniform scale — and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) analysis for […]
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The Kangerlussuaq region of southwest Greenland is a 3,728-square-mile corridor stretching from the ice sheet to the Labrador Sea. In this area near the top of the world, landscape and ecosystem diversity abounds. Flora and fauna range from microbes in the ice sheet to large herbivores — caribou and musk oxen — living on the […]
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Research professor Rick Wahle and graduate student Carl Huntsberger are testing a technique at the University of Maine Darling Marine Center to determine the age of lobsters. Unlike fish, mollusks and trees, Wahle says lobsters and other crustaceans molt — or cast off their skeletons thereby discarding external signs of growth. That means a lobster’s […]
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When AARP announced last summer that Bangor would be named the 100th community in the country to earn “age-friendly” status, leaders in Maine’s third-largest city had to make a big commitment. To receive this distinction, a city must agree to devise a comprehensive strategy to become more livable for its oldest residents. AARP had already […]
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It’s a mystery that has puzzled University of Maine assistant professor of marine biology and aquaculture Heather Hamlin and the salmon farming industry in New England: the decline in egg survival. The survival rate of fertilized salmon eggs had been as high as 80 percent. But beginning in 2000, salmon embryos began dying in large […]
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For tens of thousands of years, the warm, sticky natural asphalt that occasionally bubbled to the Earth’s surface in the area now called Los Angeles was a death sentence for some ice age animals. Woolly mammoths, camels, rabbits, horses, bison, sloths, rodents, snails, turtles, birds and saber-toothed cats perished after becoming mired in the liquid […]
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Farming of finfish, shellfish and plants in fresh and saltwater is the fastest-growing food production sector in the world and it’s growing in Maine, too. From 2007 to 2014, the total economic impact of aquaculture in Maine — including sales revenue, full- and part-time jobs and labor income — nearly tripled from $50 million to […]
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The Holstein Association USA announced this month that a member of the J.F. Witter Teaching and Research Center’s dairy herd ranks among the top 10,000 registered Holsteins in the country for Total Performance Index (CTPI). With more than 22 million registered Holsteins in the United States, the distinction places UM Robust Rosmerta in the top […]
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The use of residual forest biomass for rural development faces economic hurdles that make it unlikely to be a job source in the near future, according to an Oregon State University analysis led by a University of Maine researcher. The study, published in Forest Policy and Economics, focused on biomass generated during timber-harvesting operations. It […]
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Cooperation may be the key to successful sustainability, says Timothy Waring, an associate professor in the School of Economics and the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions. Waring is working toward a ‘theory of sustainability’ and is seeking to discover what makes sustainability possible. He’s asking the question: when, and how, do sustainable […]
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