BRUNSWICK, Maine — Chris Inexperienced, 50, has dug clams on Center Bay’s intertidal mudflats for a very long time.
“All my life. I began with my father,” Inexperienced stated Tuesday, sitting in his boat, sporting thigh-high rubber boots splattered with salty muck.
In these years, he’s seen numerous adjustments.
“The most important change can be dwindling entry,” Inexperienced stated. “Quantity two is the warming water.”
Rising water temperatures have meant extra clams and longer digging seasons. However they’ve additionally introduced extra clam predators like inexperienced crabs and milky ribbon worms.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Inexperienced stated.
Monitoring these sorts of long-term adjustments on Center Bay — and the remainder of better Casco Bay’s intertidal areas — is the main focus of a brand new on-line data portal launched by the Better Portland Council of Governments and the Casco Bay Regional Shellfish Working Group.
The web site combines a number of knowledge streams from a number of various data sources right into a single, searchable portal designed to help planning and administration within the area. It should additionally help communities alongside the bay in exchanging data, fostering extra nuanced understandings of Casco Bay’s complicated, interwoven intertidal and near-shore ecosystem.
The general public is invited to attend a webinar from 3:30-5 p.m. on Wednesday to learn to use the information portal and apply it in addressing real-world challenges.
The positioning’s varied mapping purposes concentrate on particular themes, together with shellfishing, sea-level rise, water high quality and a septic system knowledge assortment.
One clickable map exhibits overlapping makes use of alongside the shore, from Biddeford to Boothbay Harbor. One other map tracks infrastructures delicate to sea-level rise. A separate map is aimed squarely on the shellfishing group, monitoring touchdown numbers, areas closed to digging, and essential contact data for native officers.
“The intertidal zone performs an economically, ecologically and culturally essential function within the Casco Bay area,” stated Sara Mills-Knapp, director of sustainability on the Council of Governments. “Communities want to know the intertidal zone to plan for the impacts of local weather change, steadiness makes use of and handle pure assets.”
Intertidal zones are the place the ocean and land meet. Usually muddy, they’re lined with ocean water at excessive tide and uncovered to the air and solar at low tide.
Casco Bay’s intertidal zone helps human industries comparable to shellfishing and aquaculture.
Final yr, Freeport, Brunswick, Harpswell and Phippsburg diggers landed virtually 1.3 million kilos of soppy shell clams on the japanese finish of Casco Bay.
The intertidal zone additionally contains the bay’s sandy seashores, the place vacationers like to flock. Twelve million individuals visited Maine in 2020, and 17 % of them went to a seashore, in accordance with the Maine Workplace of Tourism.
Casco Bay’s intertidal zone can be dwelling to a wide range of essential plant and animal species. Its eelgrass and salt marshes assist stabilize shorelines, appearing as a protecting buffer towards storm surge and flooding. This function will solely change into extra essential as the ocean stage rises and extra dynamic storm and flood occasions happen.
Center Bay, the place Inexperienced harvests his clams, is among the few locations in Maine the place horseshoe crabs congregate to breed.
The organizations behind the brand new web site are hoping the portal will probably be helpful for these concerned in planning, decision-making and local weather change adaptation in Casco Bay’s intertidal zone. This contains native governments round Casco Bay, municipal committee members, different coastal stakeholders — and shellfishermen like Inexperienced.
“I’ll undoubtedly be utilizing it,” Inexperienced stated.
