Gouldsboro has begun work on its Shellfish Resilience Laboratory and will have it operational by this spring. Located in Bunkers Harbor, the Resilience Lab is not only a key element in Gouldsboro’s program to restore clam flats to productivity and sustainability, but will also collect data and develop know-how that other Maine communities can use to manage municipal shellfish operations as Maine’s climate changes. …
During 2018 the Gouldsboro shellfish committee and the CSI-Maine project set out “experimental units” — our “plant pot” experiments — in two coves that were once productive but had become so overrun by crabs that they were considered to be “dead mud.” In the spring of 2019, a team of students in the Pathways program at Sumner Memorial High School analyzed the data so that they could be presented to the shellfish committee and others on March 20. In this post we describe the design of the experiments and the coves where they were set out.…