Maya Pelletier calls rockweed, a type of seaweed, “the van Gogh of the intertidal.” How can citizen science help paint a picture of the state of rockweed on Maine’s coast?

Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park: www.Schoodicinstitute.org

Project ASCO 2023 Interest Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSebLgZFFoGSiW8uoz1tRMk5RRe2x4IHzjr3FlPc5d0guIE0dw/viewform

Schoodic Notes: https://schoodicnotes.blog/

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Maya Pelletier calls rockweed, a type of seaweed, “the van Gogh of the intertidal.” How can citizen science help paint a picture of the state of rockweed on Maine’s coast?[Soundscape from Bass Harbor Head Light including buoy bells, waves lapping, and birdsong]

Olivia: Sea to Trees is brought to you by Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park. I’m Olivia Milloway.

Maya: So what we see here in the intertidal is this organism that has these green tips and dark brown base, and it forms all these interesting contours when it drapes over the rocks, and it almost looks like a van Gogh painting, so that’s why I like to call it the van Gogh of the intertidal.

Olivia: That’s Maya Pelleteir, the Cathy and Jim Gero Acadia Early Career Fellow in Science Research here at Schoodic Institute, talking about an organism she’s spent the last year studying. It’s photosynthetic, meaning it produces energy from sunlight, but it’s not a plant. It’s not an animal or fungus, either–it’s an algae. To be specific, it’s a marine macroalgae, or seaweed, called Ascophyllum nodosum. Here on the coast of Maine, Ascophyllum is known by its common name, rockweed. Rockweed grows in the intertidal zone, the area between the low tide and high tides. Maya and I were observing the rockweed’s “van Gogh effect” from Frazer Point Picnic Area thanks to a low tide. When the tide has receded down the shore, the rockweed drapes over the rocks and mud, creating the brushstroke-like contours Maya described. Then, when the tide comes back in, the rockweed, buoyed by small pockets of air, floats to the surface and moves back and forth with the motion of the waves. The tide was starting to come in at Frazer Point, so we began carefully walking across the seaweed-covered rocks to answer one question: how much rockweed is there on the entire coast of Maine? You’re listening to Sea to Trees, a podcast that tells the stories of the science happening in and around Acadia from the rocky shoreline to the evergreen forests to the granite mountain tops. In this first season of the show, we’re exploring the ever-growing field of citizen science and how it can help answer questions about our changing world. In this third episode, we’re going to where the trees meet the sea–the intertidal zone.

Maya: In Maine we have a couple of different types of intertidal, so you are probably familiar with things like sandy beaches, we don't really have those here but we have a lot of boulders and a lot of, you know, rough coastlines with lots of bedrock, so that's' what we would think of as the rocky intertidal.

Olivia: We actually do have a sand beach in Acadia–so rare in the area that it’s simply called Sand Beach. The majority of Maine’s coastline is either rocky, like Maya said, or made up of mudflats, which are harvesting areas for Maine’s clammers and marine wormers.

Olivia: What’s life like living in the intertidal?

Maya: Uh, well, if you're an intertidal organism, you definitely have a rough go of it.

Olivia: The rocky intertidal zone is a hard place to live–with the constant battering of high energy waves coming in from the ocean and regular drying out periods when the tide is low, the critters living there need to adapt to constant change. Maya summed it up:

Maya: It ain’t easy.

Olivia: But still, the rocky intertidal zone is teeming with life: rock crabs, northern sea stars, blue mussels, frilled anemones, green sea urchins, and hundreds of other mollusks, crustaceans, and seaweeds. Rockweed plays a significant role in shaping life in the rocky intertidal.

Maya: Ascophyllum is a foundation species, which means that it helps structure the ecosystem. So, at high tide, it forms these 3D structures that gives habitat and hiding spaces for a lot of little critters like fish and snails and crabs, and then at the low tide, it all flops over and it creates a microhabitat beneath because of the ability that it has to maintain the moisture and a cool temperature beneath the seaweed.

Olivia: Beyond its ecological importance, rockweed is also an economic resource. I spoke with Ari Leach, a biologist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources who manages the shellfish, marine worm, and seaweed resources for the Southern half of the state.

Ari: There are records of rockweed being hand harvested early 1900s, it’s been a resource for many different areas along the coast for decades, but the commercial rockweed harvest really got going in Maine in the 70s.

Olivia: Once harvested and processed, rockweed is used as animal feed, fertilizers, and thickening agents in food. And, Ari says that annual rockweed landings–the amount that’s harvested each year–is only increasing.

Ari: Over the past 20 years the harvester landings that are reported every year to DMR, both millions of pounds harvested and total value of pounds harvested, it’s only gone up. It’s not like lobster, which is still our number one, but every year I see an increase in landings and an increase in interest from both industry and just regular public sector folks, so I anticipate it will keep growing.

Olivia: This rapid growth in Maine’s rockweed industry has led to conflict between harvesters and property owners over the sustainability of rockweed harvest. Regional closures and other management strategies have been implemented to address this conflict, and even the Maine Supreme Court has weighed in. But, all of the solutions face the same challenge: no one knows how much rockweed there is on Maine’s coast.

Ari: Over the years there have been some pretty good guesses as to what the biomass in the state is, but without a standardized tool to measure that, a guess is only a guess. And we can't make management decisions based on guesswork. Olivia: Hoping to close this information gap, a few years ago, Schoodic Institute’s Marine Ecology Director, Hannah Webber, piloted a citizen science initiative called Assessing Seaweed via Community Observation, or Project ASCO. Asco is, not coincidentally, another nickname for Ascophyllum. Here’s Hannah.

Hannah: Project ASCO was created out of a need to understand how much biomass of rockweed there is on the coast of Maine. But it was also created out of a need of having people collect data in a systematic way and in a way that seemed trustworthy to everybody.

Olivia: Part of what makes these data trustworthy is that they’re collected in a transparent way, opening up the process so that anyone can participate including property owners and rockweed harvesters. John Grotton of North Atlantic Kelp, a midcoast Maine-based company that has worked with local harvesters since the seventies to produce animal feed, fertilizers, and other rockweed products, was glad to participate in Project ASCO.

John: People on the shore, I think they are realizing that finally. We're going to have to be participants and collaborators. We're the people that are going to be the boots on the ground. We want to have independent parties doing this as well just for verification purposes, but I wholeheartedly believe we as an industry need to be involved in this.

Olivia: John said that North Atlantic Kelp has their own internal biomass assessment to ensure they’re adhering to regulations and not overharvesting in any area. But, property owners can be skeptical of industry-reported data alone. John hopes that combining harvest data with Project ASCO findings, as well as Signs of the Seasons, another rockweed citizen science project he’s participated in, will give a more well-rounded picture of rockweed’s future.

John: Sustainability is a concern of ours. We want to have data that shows the fishery is sustainable and it’s viable for future generations. That’s my main concern.

Olivia: John hopes this collaborative effort will yield updated statewide management solutions; currently, rockweed harvesting regulations vary across the state.

John: We want uniformity in the rules, and science based rules and fact based rules and some thought behind it. That's why programs like this come into play, they can lend to that management plan and harvest effort and do it in a sustainable way. Ultimately, that’s what we’re all after.

Olivia: If you count all the peninsulas, inlets, and islands, the coast of Maine is huge–longer than the coast of California. To make Project ASCO work state-wide, to create this trustworthy, much-needed data, Project ASCO needed the help of a lot of volunteers. As the Project ASCO Coordinator, Maya ran fourteen Project ASCO Trainings over the summer, from Biddeford in Southern Maine to Cobscook Bay in Downeast Maine.

Maya: I’m packing up the Project ASCO gear to head out for a training this morning. We have five quadrats, which are basically….

Olivia: Maya packs up a Project ASCO kit for each volunteer to take back with them, they have the tools to visit sites on their own to collect rockweed data, on both public and privately owned lands, with landowner permission.

Maya: ...and some scales. [Sounds of a car being packed up and started]

Maya: Alright, you buckled?

Olivia: Yep.

Maya: Let’s go.

Olivia: That day, we were headed to a Project ASCO training in Wiscasset, in Midcoast Maine. We met four citizen science volunteers a few minutes from the water and carpooled down to the Wright Landing Boat Launch. We stood at the launch, waiting for the tide to fall while Maya gave us