On July 20, at a celebration at Aselton Park in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Richard K. Sullivan Jr. was joined by US Senator John Kerry, EPA Regional Administrator Curt Spalding, state Senator Dan Wolf, state Representative Randy Hunt and other officials to announce that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency...
The Marine Environmental Research Institute (MERI) has launched Maine’s first microplastics monitoring initiative. The program will add this emerging contaminant to the list of water quality indicators in the Blue Hill Bay watershed tracked by the institute’s 9-year-old monitoring program. The monitoring team already measures pH levels, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll and temperature, and tracks...
The landscape of Grand Pré was inscribed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site at the 36th Session by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee on July 2. The site is situated in the southern Minas Basin of Nova Scotia and marked by one of the most extreme tidal ranges in the world. The Grand Pré marshland...
The six New England states unanimously agreed in late July to release a request for proposal (RFP) in 2013 for a significant amount of renewable energy. The agreement was made at the New England Governor’s Conference in Burlington, Vermont. Taking advantage of economies of scale and market power, a competitive, coordinated regional procurement of...
Department of Fish and Game (DFG) Commissioner Mary Griffin and biologists from the agency’s Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) joined youth volunteers from local environmental non-profit groups on the clam flats of Boston’s Thompson Island to help enhance the wild soft shell clam population in Boston Harbor. “Soft shell clams have been declining for...
The Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR is currently on the alert for Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning (ASP) and recently detected it in waters off the Schoodic Peninsula, close to Blue Hill Bay. The ASP organism is a phytoplankton called Pseudo-nitzschia spp. that produces a toxin called domoic acid. When domoic acid in sampled mussels...
