College of the Atlantic
AC-10: Support for Research

College of the Atlantic has a dedicated Environmental Fund, part of which is directed to the support of student research. The primary use of these funds is to support summer Energy Fellows. These positions, which are open to all qualified COA students, allow students to carry out energy and sustainability projects on campus and in the local community. Recent projects have analyzed the heating needs on campus and investigated the legal and financial framework needed for a local community-owned solar photovoltaic installation. The Environmental Fund also has supported students attending conferences on sustainability and waste reduction.

Additionally, the college annually has provided around $10,000 to support student participation in the annual meetings (Conferences of the Parties, or COPs) of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). Students participate fully in the COP and publish reports and analyses on their blog, www.earthinbrackets.org.

Approximately half of the full-time faculty positions at COA are associated with endowed funds designed to support faculty research and programmatic work within human ecology (human ecology at COA is taken to be the interdisciplinary investigation of humans' interactions with our natural, social, and built environments). These funds are attached to specific faculty positions and are designated to support work in the following sustainability-related areas: ecology and conservation biology; sustainable agriculture and food systems; applied botany; conservation law and policy; land use planning; marine biology and conservation; philosophy of human ecology; literature and gender studies; green business and entrepreneurship; art and art history; government and polity; and geology/earth sciences. Our academic program is interdisciplinary, and faculty research projects often cut across multiple disciplines.

Following is a small selection of faculty work made possible by these funds during the 2017-2018 academic year:

-Sarah Hall (geology, earth sciences) worked together with students from her ESTEM Professional Development Seminar class to organize the Acadia National Park Science Symposium, where she gave a talk on development of a multi-institution, field-based professional program for Environmental-STEM undergraduates and co-authored multiple student presentations.

-Rich Borden (psychology, human ecology) organized symposia on higher education at two Society for Human Ecology (SHE) international conferences: SHE-XXII “Envisioning Pathways to Just and Sustainable Futures: Celebrating Diversity, Pursuing Integration, Developing Livable Communities” in Los Banos, Phillippines and SHE-XXIII, “Navigating Complexity: Human-Environment Solutions for a Challenging Future” in Lisbon, Portugal. He also published two articles: “Insight and Wonder: Human Ecology in Everyday Life” in Human Ecology Journal, and “Psychological Dimensions of Sustainability” in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.

-John Anderson (zoology, ecology, animal behavior) worked with 11 students and one alumna to conduct gull ecology research on Great Duck Island. This year’s work included mapping the distribution and abundance of gulls nesting on the island, and tagging herring gulls with GPS tags to monitor their movements on the breeding grounds and during the winter season. Preliminary results and a paper on the conservation implications of this work were presented at the August meeting of the International Ornithological Congress in Vancouver.

-Isabel Mancinelli (ecological planning, policy, and design) and her Land Use Planning class worked together with the Ellsworth Green Plan gathering information and illustrating alternative futures for portions of the city. They completed a street tree survey for the major city road, generated images to show how implementation of a tree planting plan would look, and produced a report and presentation for the city including recommendations for zoning changes, improved bicycle and pedestrian access, and stormwater infrastructure

-Sean Todd (biology, marine mammals completed a successful transit of the Northwest Passage (Greenland to Alaska) as a guest lecturer and resident scientist aboard the M/S Le Boreal representing COA’s North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog. He also co-authored a paper in Nature Scientific Reports: “Long-term passive acoustic recordings track the changing distribution of North Atlantic right whales over the past decade” and his Great Courses project, “Life in the World’s Oceans” was released in February 2018.

-Kourtney Collum (food systems, sustainable agriculture) worked on a collaborative research project with the University of Maine to examine the scale challenges and opportunities for beekeeping and maple syrup production in Maine.

-Ken Cline (law, public policy) has conducted and presented research on the legal rights of nature, particularly the question of juridical personhood for a river or land, which has potential relevance for conservation work in Maine and elsewhere.

-Jay Friedlander (sustainable business) developed and expanded his work on “The Abundance Cycle,” a sustainable business model merging strategy and sustainability. He presented a three-day seminar for faculty from several Danish colleges and universities on teaching sustainable entrepreneurship and achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals with the Abundance Cycle. As a result of this workshop, the Abundance Cycle was named as a foundational theory, and COA as a partner in a 2018 proposal to the Nordic Council of Ministers entitled “Promoting Sustainable Student Entrepreneurship in the Arctic.”

COA is by definition an interdisciplinary college and faculty. As such, it is an expectation that our non-departmental faculty work towards making contributions to interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary research and teaching. This is assessed during faculty reviews as part of the faculty member's contribution to the intellectual depth and diversity of the college.

College of the Atlantic's Thorndike Library supports sustainability research and learning in a variety of ways. We have a subject guide titled Sustainable Food Systems that focuses on library and learning resources. The library developed this guide with assistance from students and faculty involved with sustainable food systems studies at the college. The library also has an extensive collective of books and other resources that support classes emphasizing sustainability. These classes deal with topics such as climate change, composting, renewable energy solutions for coastal islands, and more. Our regular online databases and library collections provide support for sustainability research. Materials that are needed for research that are not readily available in the library can be acquired through the Inter-Library Loan service as part of MINERVA, a state-wide consortium of libraries in Maine.