In this season premiere episode of Sea to Trees we’ll travel to the largest freshwater wetland in Acadia National Park: The Great Meadow. Listen to learn more about the ongoing restoration of the Great Meadow, how soil coring can take us back in time to visualize a landscape thousands of years ago, and how an Indigenous approach to wetland restoration means restoring relationships and food sovereignty.

Sea to Trees Season 4 Episode 1: Place-based Science | The Freshwater Wetland

Narration Seven years ago, I woke up to a bright, freezing winter day. In the deepest recesses of winter in Maine the question, “What am I going to do today?” always feels daunting to me. Usually my answer is to cozy up under a blanket and watch movies rather than brace the cold. But on this particular day, videos of people ice skating on the smoothest ice I’d ever seen were spreading around social media. The videos showed my high-school classmates skating in between birch trees in an area called Sieur de Monts Spring on Mount Desert Island. I love ice skating so I knew what I was going to do that day.

[music]

I squeezed into multiple pairs of pants, pulled layer after layer over my head and threw my skates into the back of the car, ready to take on the cold. I arrived and eagerly laced up my skates, slipped on my mittens and glided out onto the ice. I was greeted with the familiar winter silence I’ve known my whole life and continued to explore. The ice was smooth and clear as glass. I skimmed further into the line of birch trees, weaving between their silvery trunks that seemingly grew from the ice and pushed out beyond the treeline into the Great Meadow. I looked back at where I had just skated from and it was like a forest had grown up out of a lake and then the lake had frozen. The smooth, glassy ice was so clear I could see a wooden boardwalk path beneath me. I continued skating, circling around the birch trees and marveling at what an other-worldly feeling it was to skate in a forest.

For years I’ve looked back on the memory of that day and remembered just how magical it was. But there’s more hiding beneath the surface here. This thick ice obscured the story beneath, but didn’t erase it. Because where I was skating is not a lake. Those boardwalks and birches are not normally under water. So what’s the story of this place?

Dr. Suzanne Greenlaw: There's a lot of information of on Great Meadow, historical information, but it's all in separate places. So there's herbarium records, there is inventory records the park has done over 40 years, there is, like, anthropological sort of records that are in different kinds of museums from, you know, 50, 150, years ago. But they don't all show up in one place that can tell a story, like a time scale story, right?

This is a problem for all of us, is that the data in these places are in these separate boxes and don't aren't able to work together to tell a full length story of the landscape

You are listening to Sea to Trees. I am Julia Rush and today I’m taking you into the Great Meadow, the largest freshwater wetland in Acadia National Park. We’ll learn about the ongoing restoration happening there, how soil coring can take us back in time to visualize a landscape thousands of years ago, and how an indigenous approach to wetland restoration means restoring relationships and food sovereignty.

Dr. Suzanne Greenlaw, whom you just heard, is a post-doctoral scientist and Indigenous ecologist at Schoodic Institute. You'll also hear from Dr. Chris Nadeau, a climate change adaptation scientist at Schoodic Institute, Lauren Gibson, Wild Acadia Coordinator at Friends of Acadia, and Andrea Nurse, paleoecology research associate at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute.

[music fades out]

Julia Rush: Do you think you could, like, describe, kind of what we're looking at, because we've been talking about it, and I'm trying to, like, translate that to somebody who can't see because it's pretty spectacular, like, and it's kind of hard to describe. But how would you, yeah how would you describe it?

Lauren Gibson: Sure, yeah so right now we’re literally standing in the wetland we’ve got the park loop road behind us we can tell how interested people are to see the vista we are at, because it's so busy, people are stopping, they slow down to take a look. But we're looking at Dorr Mountain, which is amazing right now because you're seeing some of the fall foliage, the oranges and yellows and the reds are really starting to pop. But you can just kind of see like this. All the grasses and the shrubs that make up the meadow are just beautiful in the sunlight right now, you've got Cromwell brook that cuts through the meadow and kind of winds its way through those grasses and those shrubs.

Lauren Gibson is the Wild Acadia coordinator for Friends of Acadia. The Wild Acadia initiative is a partnership between Friends of Acadia, Schoodic Institute, and the National Park Service. It’s an interdisciplinary approach to restoration and management of resources in the Park. Lauren and I met at the edge of Great Meadow earlier this fall to talk about the troubled wetland.

Lauren G: Well, you know, if you just drive by, you look at it and you're like, oh my gosh, it's beautiful you have Dorr mountain, the vista, the wetland, it's so it is, it's beautiful. But when you get down into it, just like you're experiencing right now, you're like, Wait, is it supposed to look like this? And the answer is, No, it's not as healthy or as functional as it should be.

When Lauren says the vista I want to help you try and picture what we’re experiencing: trees line both sides of the main road that cuts through the park.

[music]

As you round an unassuming corner there’s a break in the trees on the right that gives way to the expanse of the meadow. The grasses and sedges that make up most of the wetland spread out all throughout the space and bow and sway together in the wind. Dorr mountain rises up straight out of the meadow to balance the rich landscape into the view Lauren and I are taking in. And yet, it’s a deceiving picture because it’s not very healthy. So what would a healthy Great Meadow wetland look like?

Dr. Chris Nadeau: So, so there are a few things that are more typical of a healthy, quote, unquote, healthy wetland.

Doctor Chris Nadeau is a climate change adaptation scientist at Schoodic Institute working on the Great meadow restoration project.

Chris N: One of the main, one of the main things we focus on is the hydrology, so how water flows through the wetland. And so the water shouldn't be super duper variable, and so it shouldn't go swinging between super duper dry and absolutely flooded.

Absolutely flooded, just like in my ice skating story.

Lauren G: When you're standing here, it's like nearly impossible to imagine that much water in the wetland, especially you look at how high the vegetation is, too, and to think that at one point, all you saw was ice, and people ice skating out in this wetland, just how much water and how high that water was, and what a unique experience for there to be a freezing event on top of it and allow people to access the meadow that way.

That freezing event was preceded by a combination of snowfall, melting, and rainfall that were sequenced just right to create the inches-thick ice I skated on. That day of ice skating underlines the need for the restoration happening here, which has focused on the culvert where all of the water in Great Meadow drains out of.

Lauren G: So right now, the culvert is just a 36 inch diameter circle, which sometimes also gets clogged. And so in those big rainstorms that we see, if the water, you know, sometimes it's not able to move through at all, and in other times, it's just an inadequate space for that amount of water to move through. So we're seeing flooding, extreme flooding events, and then this summer, you know, extreme drought. So what we're hoping that the culvert replacement will do is eliminate those really high highs and those really low lows, and reduce the flashiness of the system.

So the culvert responsible for draining all of the water from Great Meadow is only three feet in diameter. When a large rainstorm blows through and the water rushes down Dorr Mountain and settles into the wetland, all it has is this little straw to push through to drain. And then on the flip side, the current culvert doesn’t facilitate a natural stream flow, so in long dry periods, water drains from the wetland far too fast leaving it dry.

Chris N: From a natural perspective, there's only so many critters that can live in a place that is super dry sometimes, and then a few weeks later, it's super wet, and then a few weeks after that, it's super dry. So the wetland needs to get restored to a more natural hydrologic function. Having wetland water flow through the wetland more naturally, and that will help restore kind of the plants and animals that live in the wetland too.

The next stage of the restoration will be to install a twelve foot box culvert. This new culvert has a bottom that mimics a natural stream bed and allows wildlife to pass beneath the road. It sounds pretty simple, but this project requires lots of planning, engineering and collaboration. One huge factor that we haven’t even touched on yet is the people on this landscape. Acadia National Park is a very busy place. It's one of the most visited National Parks in the country and sees millions of visitors every year. Closing the Great Meadow off from visitors for this ongoing project isn’t an option, so people play a big role in the planning process. But people are also a big part of why the wetland is facing so many challenges. George Dorr was one of the founders of Acadia National Park and dedicated much of his life to preserving areas around Mount Desert Island, especially the Great Meadow.

Lauren G: George Dorr, when he arrived like he was really fascinated by this area, and so also wanted to make it accessible, and making it accessible meant building roads and a trail system through the wetland into Sieur de Monts and that infrastructure still exists today and serves to impede the hydrology.

The history of Mount Desert Island does not begin with Dorr, however. Acadia National Park lies within traditional Wabanaki homeland.

Wabanaki, meaning Dawnland People, is a collective term for the people who have inhabited these lands since time immemorial, represented today by four federally-recognized Native American Tribes, Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Mi’kmaq Nation, Penobscot Nation, and the Passamaquoddy Tribe.

Today Wabanaki communities are collaborating with the National Park Service to restore relationships with the place now known as Acadia, including in The Great Meadow. Doctor Suzanne Greenlaw, who we heard from earlier, is a post-doctoral scientist at Schoodic Institute and she works with Wabanaki communities to restore traditional harvesting within the Park. She’s an ecologist, writer and traditional harvester and is a citizen of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians.

Suzanne Greenlaw: A lot of the work I do is what is current today. So that means, like, how do we create tools and management strategies to benefit native people?

When Suzanne started working on the Great Meadow project, she was greeted with a ton of questions.

Suzanne G: Wabanaki people were asking, Well, what was there in the past? What? How has the land changed? Landscape changed over time, like, what is the land telling us? How can the land inform us, help us make our decisions? And and I found that really hard to answer

But what does it mean to look back in time at the land to tell a story? How far back do you go when you try to tell that story?

Suzanne G: We are limited to 150 years ago, 100 years ago, and we were finding these records of times from like, you know, George Dorr, and these kind of comments about, maybe about what was there in the past. But how do we know actually, what was there, even before, sort of Europeans came, before George Dorr started writing these down, right? And can you actually 100% believe what they're saying in a lot of ways, like, right? There's a lot of these people who wrote, kind of wrote in certain ways that you can tell that maybe it's, it's a little, I don't know the right word, but it's like, their stories are a little embellished. Or is their indigenous accounts of indigenous relationships truthful?

It seems like a nearly impossible challenge right? How can you accurately visualize a landscape hundreds or even thousands of years ago? Suzanne had heard about soil coring, a research technique where scientists take a vertical cylinder of earth that can then be dated and analyzed in a lab. Specifically, the pollen and plant DNA in the soil can be analyzed to paint a clearer image of what kinds of plants grew there in the past.

Suzanne G: Most of the time, like soil cores are done in an archeological sort of field. But we were wondering is, could these cores help us to make decisions for restoration?

So after Acadia’s Program Manager for Natural and Cultural Resources suggested soil coring, plans were made for the soil samples to be taken from the Great Meadow and analyzed. Suzanne included a list of plants of interest that are culturally significant for Wabanaki communities. In August, a team of National Park, Schoodic Institute and Friends of Acadia staff took to Great Meadow to collect soil samples.

[sounds of feet walking on the wooden boardwalk, folks chatting, cicadas]

Lauren G: We’re looking for an orange flag that’s like about twenty feet off the boardwalk so if anybody spies it let us know.

We’re back on the boardwalk in Great Meadow, except this time, it’s not covered in ice. This summer was actually one of those extremely dry periods so we could step down into the wetland and not get wet at all. Imagining the ice on this particular day provided a bit of a reprieve from heat that was in the upper eighties paired with thick, muggy humidity.

But laden with equipment, measuring instruments, plenty of water and one microphone we braved the beating sun and collected the samples.

Andrea Nurse: Okay, so the so the plan is to do two cores side by side, here and right here. So the tricky part, or maybe we can move over a little bit, but the tricky part is not to step on the other core while you're trying to get this one out.

Andrea Nurse lead the soil coring and works at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute as a paleoecologist. She specializes in pollen and plant macrofossil analysis which means she studies the pollen from soil samples to identify what plants were growing there at a particular time in history.

Before we get any further into the soil coring, I must confess, I myself didn’t really know how a soil coring worked before we trekked out into the Meadow. So let me break it down for you.

[music starts]

Imagine a chocolate cake that has multiple layers of cake and frosting. Now imagine sticking a straw down into the cake and pulling it back out. In that little cylinder you get a clear view of all the layers and what’s going on below the surface of the cake, like maybe there’s a ganache layer you didn’t even realize was there!

Back in the meadow, in place of a straw, we used metal corers about a meter long and a few inches in diameter. Just like on the cake, we pushed the corer into the earth

Chorus of voices: Okay, ready, friends?

And then pulled it back out,

Chorus of voices: Okay, let's see if we can get it out. 123, oh, yeah, it's coming. There it is. Keep that tight. Keep that tight.

To bring up a sample. Then that sample is sealed up and taken back to the lab to be studied.

Andrea N: What we're doing here with the Schoodic Institute and Acadia National Park is looking at how the vegetation has changed over time on the great meadow. The great meadow being the largest freshwater wetland within Acadia National Park. And my role is to take sediment cores, which we've already done, from great meadow, and study them incrementally from probably about 8000 years ago to present, and when I say studying them incrementally, we'll take samples every few centimeters and process the sediments to extract the pollen, and then I identify what pollen is there under a microscope.

The question I was asking at this point was how far down are we coring into the meadow? If we are shooting for eight-thousand years ago like Andrea said, how do we know once we’ve reached deep enough in the earth?

Andrea N: At the bottom it's gray clay. And that gray clay was laid down by it's called glacial marine clay. So as the glaciers were melting, there was water and fine rock dust coming into that area, running off the glaciers, and it was mixing with sea water, and it just it produces a gray clay that covers much of the south eastern part of Maine.

Thankfully, it was shockingly obvious once we started to hit this glacial clay. For the most part these cores are brown and earthy pretty much all the way down, until you hit that clay. In stark contrast to the browns of the sediment, the glacial clay is blue-grey and dense, dense like the clay you would use to make pottery.

Julia Oh yeah look! Found the clay Chorus of voices: Exclamations

The excitement of laying eyes on clay that was deposited in a time when glaciers sat miles high above Mount Desert Island never really got old the entire day of soil coring. This clip was after hours of working the corer in and out of the earth and hauling all of our equipment even deeper into the wetland to get to the second coring site under the beating sun. And it wasn’t even the first time we pulled up glacial clay, but each time we saw that bright grey at the bottom of the core it sent a wave of pure awe through the group at the sheer timescale of this project.

After we labeled and carefully packed up each soil core, they were then taken back to the lab at University of Maine to begin the pollen analysis. Results from Andrea’s pollen study will be transformed into a data visualization project that will be able to give scientists, park managers and visitors a look at a continuous timescale story of the Great Meadow Wetland beginning thousands of years ago.

But the work doesn’t stop there for Suzanne.

Suzanne G: What I’m finding in a lot of the literature, especially from the Midwest and even further west, that a lot of wetland areas were actually are sources of food for indigenous people and for us in Maine in the east, I would say that relationship to the wetlands and those food sources has been so long since we've been removed from a lot of these places, we don't have a lot of those traditional foods in our diet anymore

When Wabanaki, people are thinking about restoring they're also it's not just a restoration of health for a wetland, it's rest, but it is that, but it's also restoration of people in relationship to a wetland, so that, that there's, there's like a, it's always a relationship based approach, in the sense that, you know, we see these landscapes as places of home and so, so what does that mean to restore human relationship in these locations as well?

Can restoration also be a food sovereignty project? And what does that like to include a community, and if these plants so, we include plants of interest now, but also plants of interest for future relationships. And then can a restoration project also support distribution of food?

The plants that Andrea is looking for in the pollen analysis include native plants that could be re-introduced into the wetland to help restore it. Some of those are plants of interest for Wabanaki communities meaning they have traditional uses as food and medicine. Bringing those native plants back to the landscape will help heal the Great Meadow, supporting the overall ecosystem. Suzanne’s goal is to bring Wabanaki harvesters back to the wetland to practice traditional harvesting and gather food for their community once those plants are restored. Suzanne G: Right so a healthy environment is also means a healthy people.

That's easy to say that, but how do you enact that? How do you put that into action?

Putting that into action actually, is a lot of work, because as just one scientist in a restoration project, that means I need to actually have a lot of partnerships and relationships and make this as collaborative and open as possible, with Wabanaki nonprofits who are doing food distribution, who are doing food harvesting, so restoration becomes a community effort, and not just an individual science you know, like a handful of scientific efforts.

If this sounds like something you’ve never heard of before within a restoration project, it’s because you probably haven’t. This community-based approach to restoration is fairly rare in Acadia. Suzanne is no stranger to the feeling of working in unknown territory.

Suzanne G: So what I've learned in the work that I do and the work that I guess I do, I also want to not make it seem like I do it. But the work that many indigenous people who are in academia, who are in these sort of science worlds the roles that we have and the work that we do is, is somewhat, pushing forward into a path that is not hasn't been there before, all right, so having a like say Bonnie, having a Penobscot archeologist, having you know people, people from the community, being the researcher of their own community, is not an easy path. And people be like, nobody's ever done that before. I mean, I don't know how many times I've heard that right, which is very nice in some ways, but it's also really lonely, and other times and constantly having to change, or, like, move the direction. It's like moving a river, almost like, you know, this flow is going this way. Everything has always gone this way. And how do you actually shift the river to actually make it more community driven, or which is not even participatory research, right? There's all these sort of methodologies that say, Oh, this is how we do community research. They're all not, they're not for Native people half the most of the time. So actually, how do you do research for and by Native people? Is, is both really rewarding and also can be really challenging.

Growing up here I knew a very brief history of Wabanaki people, but looking under my feet under the ice and discovering the boardwalk below was like taking a look at the full story of the Great Meadow. There is an entire history that is a living, breathing part of this place and it’s right in front of us and isn’t going away.

Like Suzanne said, it takes moving rivers to make change happen within an established system. That takes collaborative initiatives like this one and people like Suzanne who lead in moving the rivers. And it takes individuals who are willing to look through the ice and face the stories that have always been there and are a part of this land we call home.

Thank you for listening to Sea to Trees, a podcast from Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, inspiring science, learning and community for a changing world. Acadia National Park is on traditional lands of the Wabanaki, people of the dawn.

A big thank you to this episode's guests Dr. Suzanne Greenlaw, Lauren Gibson, Dr. Chris Nadeau, and Andrea Nurse.

Sea to Trees is written and produced by me, Julia Rush, and edited by Catherine Schmitt and Sarah Luchini. The cover art was created by Sarah Luchini. Sea to Trees is possible through generous support of the Cathy and Jim Gero Acadia Early-Career Fellowship, the National Park Foundation, National Park Service, and Schoodic Institute.

Reference Links:

● Great Meadow Wetland Rehab to Reclaim More Natural Flow: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/great-meadow-wetland-rehab-to-reclaim-more-natural-flow.htm ● Wild Acadia: https://friendsofacadia.org/our-impact/wild-acadia/

● Flooding and freezing event: https://www.nps.gov/articles/wild-winter-weather.htm ● Wabanaki Alliance: https://www.wabanakialliance.com/ ● Abbe Museum: https://www.abbemuseum.org/