The Wrack
The Wrack is the Wells Reserve blog, our collective logbook on the web.
The Wrack is the Wells Reserve blog, our collective logbook on the web.
Three angles of investigation into three waterways flowing through three municipalities have reached one encouraging conclusion: The Merriland River, Branch Brook, and the Little River are ecologically healthy and the people largely responsible, those living in the combined watershed, know and appreciate it.
The design for our Sustaining Coastal Landscapes and Community Benefits project, the first study of its kind, drew from the sciences of ecology, economy, and communications. Reserve staff and their colleagues from Clark University looked at streamside buffers in Sanford, Kennebunk, and Wells to find out how they affect life in the water and how members of the community value them.
Sanford, the town with York County's largest population, contains the headwaters of these five rivers:
The Wells Reserve has produced or assisted with every key conservation planning document prepared for southern Maine watersheds over the past decade. The most recent issue of the Watermark newsletter includes a chart to show which plans cover each town and watershed. You can download the watershed conservation chart below (it's a small PDF).
The Coastal Training Program team has been hard at work helping the Town of Sanford to outline goals and strategies for achieving open space and resource protection in the town's natural areas and working landscapes.
In 2008, the Coastal Training Program assisted the town with a series of workshops designed to bring community stakeholders together, to share their visions for the future of Sanford, and to craft a plan for realizing those visions.