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Tiny Creatures Find Some Big Friends

May 20, 2009 - AUGUSTA -- State regulators have been protecting Maine's vernal pools for more than a year. Now, more communities and citizens are taking up the cause.

As of this spring, 13 Maine communities have mobilized volunteers to help defend vernal pools by finding and mapping their locations. Residents of Topsham, Freeport, Windham, Scarborough and other towns tromped through woods and wetlands in recent weeks, around the same time wood frogs and salamanders were converging on the seasonal wetlands to breed and lay eggs.

"It was such a great experience," said Angela Twitchell of Topsham, who surveyed pools with her 8-year-old son, Hayden Libby. "I'd heard about vernal pools a lot, but I had never actually gone out and looked at egg masses, and seen these things you think of as puddles as being full of life."

Vernal pools are seasonal wetlands that appear when the snow melts and typically dry up each summer. Long dismissed, they are now seen as critical breeding and nursery grounds for wood frogs, salamanders and other creatures that make up the bottom of the forest food chain.

Since September 2007, state law has protected the most productive vernal pools and the land around them. Landowners and developers who want to disturb an area with a vernal pool have to survey the pool in the spring to see whether it has a certain number of frog or salamander eggs. If the pool qualifies as a significant habitat, state law requires the developer to get a permit before developing within 250 feet.

Because there can be several hundred vernal pools in a single community, and inspecting them can be done only for a brief period each spring, there is no statewide vernal pool map to help landowners or community planners. The pools are typically identified when they are in the path of a potential development.

Mapping the small, temporary pools is something that can be done only at the local level, said Aram Calhoun, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Maine and the leader of the community survey effort.

The university started with Falmouth in 2004 and has now trained volunteers in 13 towns to map pools.

Funding from the university and groups such as Maine Audubon cover most of the costs, although the communities have to raise some money, typically around $2,000.

Each community starts with aerial photographs to identify potential vernal pools, and then sends small teams of volunteers into the field to confirm the presence of pools and count amphibian eggs.

Volunteers need landowner permission, so they typically survey only about half of the potential pools in any one town.

Volunteers actually visit each pool twice, first after wood frogs lay eggs – late April in southern Maine – and then again after salamanders lay their eggs around mid-May.

The information is collected and analyzed to determine which vernal pools are significant habitats. After two years of surveys, the towns end up with maps that can be used by planners, developers and landowners.

The maps are not the final authority on whether a pool has state protection – the Department of Environmental Protection makes that decision.

Volunteers have proved to be reliable, said Dawn Morgan, a UMaine graduate student who has been training high school students, retirees and others to do the work.

Morgan said she is getting so many requests from towns now that she has to turn some down. She is planning to write a training manual so they can start the project on their own.

"The program's really gained momentum in this past year," Morgan said. "Towns are realizing it's a difficult resource to work with and it's really to their advantage to proactively map them."

Mapping might be just a first step for communities, according to Calhoun.

"The hope is that towns have these maps and they start planning and linking open spaces" to protect wildlife corridors, she said.

Falmouth, the first Maine town to map vernal pools, has adopted local protections, including a 50-foot no-disturbance buffer. A town planning committee is now talking about updating the maps and developing a new ordinance to expand protections around vernal pools.

"Other towns are catching up," said Joe Wrobleski, a town councilor and member of the planning committee in Falmouth. "I'm hoping our new ordinance will also be a model for other towns to follow."

Topsham isn't yet talking about local rules to protect the 200 or so pools that volunteers hope to map in that town, said Rod Melanson, the community's natural resources planner. But the map project is sure to make a difference, he said.

"It will just create landowner awareness and town awareness," he said. "It definitely helps the town protect its resources."

By JOHN RICHARDSON, Staff Writer, Portland Press Herald, May 16, 2009


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