Brian Gibson joined the Stewardship Program this summer as the Richard G. Rockefeller Conservation Intern through Maine Coast Heritage Trust. Below he shares some of his experiences and accomplishments during his internship here at the reseve. He is a junior at Connecticut College majoring in environmental science with a minor in statistics and data science.

I started my summer at the Wells Reserve on June 10th after a week of training with Maine Coast Heritage Trust. During this training we learned about invasive plants, land acquisitions and conservation easements, and other various aspects of land trusts and reserves. There were a total of 11 interns through this program who were all stationed at different land trusts and reserves though the coast of Maine. Once I got to the Reserve, I got started on projects right away. Though there were many smaller projects, such as organizing the Wells Reserve species inventory, building and installing water stations in Spurwink marsh, and providing assistance to others projects, there were three main projects that I was a part of. Those were the invasive plants team, the eco-acoustics projects, and working with the facilities team.

The Invasive Plant Removal Team (a.k.a. “Wildlife Warriors”)

I presented to the potential volunteers on two separate occasions early in my time here about safety and the invasive plants we worked with this summer. After those presentations, every Thursday and Friday from 9:30am to 12:30pm I led a team of one to five Reserve volunteers out onto the trails, to work in priority locations, predominantly on the Laird-Norton trail. While there, we used mattocks and loppers to remove invasive plants along the trail. The plants that we targeted the most were Barberry, Bittersweet, and Honeysuckle. We spend around two and a half hours removing these invasives and loading them up into the trailer. After that I drive the trailer back to the burn pile where I unload the brush for disposal later in the season. Over the course of the summer we made a large amount of noticeable progress in the areas we worked in. With the large amount of invasive plants on the reserve it isn’t feasible to remove all of them, so we focus on areas where they haven’t spread significantly, and where if enough are removed it could give the native plants a chance to compete.

The Sounds of the Reserve (Eco-acoustical monitoring)

The Reserve has recorded a large amount of audio files from a variety of habitats over the past seven years as part of a national project to develop eco-acoustic monitoring capacity within the Reserve system. Most of this data had not been analyzed and were stored on hard drives. During a ride to a field site one day I mentioned that I had experience with a statistics program called R, skills necessary for analyzing the backlog of eco-acoustic data. I was immediately assigned to start working through the SOP of how to set the files up for analysis and how to analyze the files. I then used this to analyze days of data that were deemed important. I spent several days formatting and analyzing data, and documenting the results. I also reviewed relevant scientific publications to learn more about how to interpret the results and more deeply research the field of eco-acoustics and soundscape ecology. The results of my work will be used to inform future use of these methods at the Reserve

Making Everything Look Pretty

Every Tuesday from when I arrived until 12:00 pm I would help with various projects that needed to be done around the Reserve. For the most part this meant the widening trails which had become overgrown, mostly the Musky trail. I would do this mostly with a string trimmer but I also occasionally used a brush saw. Another project I assisted them with was the expansion of the Chestnut Grove. In order to give the younger chestnut trees room to grow and expand, we greatly increased the area of the grove. I assisted with the removal of the brush and bringing it to the burn pile, along with the planting of grass in the area.