 My name is Meg. I'm the Science and Technology Librarian here at PPL and one half of this series. I'm lucky enough to work with Jessica Burton from the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We're in our third year. So, America Countdowners, we do this the fourth Wednesday of every month. And I'm just going to tell you who's coming up in the lead now. Next month on March 27th, we're really excited to have Heather Necargo of Wild Seed Project. She's going to be presenting Why Going Native Matters. And it's going to cover the many reasons we shall care about our region's native flora and bring these plants back into our developed landscapes. Then in April, it's sort of a theme here. Wild Bees Super pollinators will be presented by Deborah Perkins. She's a wildlife ecologist, a first-life wildlife habitat. And she's going to talk about the fascinating lives of our native bees and also how we can save them. Then in May, Donna Hegan is going to be here to present when science doesn't matter. And he's from Manomet and their approach is building relationships of trust to create change. We do take a summer recess because there are often a lot of really lovely Wednesday nights to go out into Pasco Bay or ride a bike. So we encourage people to take advantage of the cleaning season. And we'll see you back here in September, which is to be determined. But we're really excited to have Cinnamon Catlin Legucco of the Abbey Museum. And she's going to be presenting Discomfort and Renewal, Decolonizing the Abbey Museum. Without further ado, Jess is going to introduce our speaker. Thanks Meg. I'm Jess Burton with the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative for a Service Center for Land and Water Conservation Organizations in Southern Maine. We work with 19 different organizations and we really work on a power of together and what that means for conservation in our community and sustainability. So one of my favorite parts of my job is the ability to work with the library. As an organization committed to partnership and collaboration, we really believe that in that theory of change, that together we're stronger. And so working with the library we're able to access all sorts of different interesting resources and people and topics. So, and tonight is a wonderful... We welcome Molly Payne Nguyen, Conservation Scientist with the Nature Conservancy. She oversees studies that expand our understanding of migratory fish in Maine and scientifically documents the impacts that restoration work is having on these fish, other wildlife, and the ecosystem. She coordinates ecological monitoring of the Penobscot River Reservation Project, manages collection of road stream crossing data, and conducts a myriad of public outreach, education, and citizen science efforts including organizing and garnering support of World Fish Migration Day. Molly earned her Bachelor of Science from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and her Masters of Science at the University of Southern Maine. Are she studying the microchemistry of fish earphones? So that's going to be a question. So we're thrilled to have Molly join us tonight and thank you all for coming. Hi everyone, thank you so much for venturing out into the frigid temperatures today. I am sorry to say that you're not hearing this talk from Josh Royte who is our senior scientist at the Nature Conservancy and who was originally slated to be here. Unfortunately, he is with his wife in post-op who fell on the ice this week and broke her leg in three places and so they've had a wild week so to speak and so he sends his regrets and I just have to say that he is really the reason behind a lot of this work. He's been a foundation at the Nature Conservancy in Maine as well as countless other conservation organizations here in Maine but also around the globe as I'll touch on later tonight in the presentation. So if you see Josh send him and his wife well wishes and you'll get a sneak peek of him featured in a new documentary that's up and coming about World Fish Migration Day so I'll give you a little teaser if I entertain you enough to stick through the whole presentation. Without further ado, first of all just sort of introducing you to the Nature Conservancy so the Nature Conservancy has an office in Brunswick, Maine and the mission of the Nature Conservancy is to conserve and protect the land and waters in which all life depends and in order to solve these really critical challenges of our environment it's become more and more apparent that people play a really important role in that as well and so another mission I guess so to speak of the Nature Conservancy is to enhance the lives of people around the world. So this series is about sustainability so before I launch into the details about our river restoration work in Maine and how that's touching down around the globe I thought I'd talk a little bit about how river restoration and connecting rivers in Maine really links to that theme and idea of sustainability so as you can see the image here we have sort of a stretch of river that's really beautiful and blue and free flowing and it's very well connected and not only is it connected longitudinally but it's also connected laterally so the river itself is connected but it's also connected to the vegetation the wetlands, the landscape and the forests on either side of that and that's really important because maintaining healthy rivers and healthy streams much like healthy bodies and healthy people allows us to support ecosystems that are more resistant and more resilient especially in the face of a changing climate so keep that in the back of your mind as I'm talking about all of these great examples of river restoration that's happening in our own backyards and around the globe so interestingly enough the Nature Conservancy the Maine chapter was actually one of the first chapters of TNC and it was established, founded in part by Rachel Carson in the 1950s and so over the course of the past several decades the Nature Conservancy has really had a core mission of conserving land and not so surprisingly deeply embedded in these land conservation projects were really important paramount bodies of water so here are just some of examples of places that the Nature Conservancy has conserved since the 50s and you can see that sort of the highlights of some of these places are the bodies of water that are embedded in them and so it wasn't until fairly recently like within the past 20 years that the sort of focus shifted especially for TNC and Maine in really thinking about conservation strategies that were specifically targeted to freshwater and conservation of freshwater systems so I mentioned TNC and Maine it's also an international organization so there are 50, so there are chapters in all 50 states as well as countries around the globe and the green here I just sort of pulled out and highlighted some of the places internationally where we have really prominent freshwater focus so places like South Africa and Gabon, Myanmar, India and the Balkan rivers the programs there have really substantial focus on the conservation of rivers and freshwater systems and so as an international organization as a whole there are priorities that stand out organization-wide but each of the state chapters and international chapters have slightly different priorities as you can imagine because our ecosystems are slightly different around the world so all in all the organization focuses on land protection and management and restoring rivers so this is about connectivity, fish passage, water quality looking at ocean sustainability, so sustainable fisheries management climate adaptation, thinking about reducing carbon emissions, renewable energy food and water sustainability policy so thinking about alternative funding sources, permitting and protection and then this element of connecting people with nature so people are inevitably really integrated with our landscapes around the globe and so it's really important that we think about conservation and protection of ecosystems with humans in mind as well so not only is it about sort of all of those factors and different parameters that I outlined in terms of conservation and protection but it's also about essentially focusing on places where there's a great amount of biodiversity and the places where we have the biggest impact to sustain whole ecosystems and again just this concept of how integrated people are in this idea of conservation and healthy ecosystems we have really great examples of people and their investments in our ecosystems here in Maine so I have a couple examples of commercial fishing and recreational fishing for example and not only that but inspiring art and creativity and general human well-being so now I'm at the part of the talk where I'm going to tell you all about how great Maine is as a state and from an ecological perspective I hope you can relate to my excitement and bragging nature about this but Maine is really unique especially our rivers and our sea-run fish populations so we have 12 native species of diademous fish and diademous means that they're sea-run so they spend part of their life cycle in the marine environment and part of their life cycle in the freshwater environment so as you can imagine if there are certain parts of your life stage that are dependent on accessing habitat you really need to be able to get in between or move across those habitats in order to survive so if we look at all of the sea-run fish species in Maine and we look at a map of sort of where the ranges of these different species fall you can see that it pretty much covers the entire state so all of these animals are moving themselves and nutrients back and forth between the marine system and the majority of our state so if we look back 200, 300, even thousands of years there's evidence that these migrations in the spring of fish moving between the ocean and the freshwater habitats were amazingly impressive so it's often said that in the past our rivers ran silver and silver because of the scales and the coloring of the fish so there's really incredible testimony to this if you look back in some of the literature from the 17th and 18th centuries so I have a couple of quotes that I just pulled out and I'll kind of let you read these and sit with them for a second and this last one is really my favorite 1650 it was noted that at certain times the entire surface of the river for a foot deep was all fish so that's pretty incredible and you can imagine that historically the people who lived in Maine for tens of thousands of years so the indigenous communities relied on these fish for a major source of their protein and the European settlers up into modern times really had these incredible links to the migratory fish here in Maine the ability to use these fish as an economic source as well as a food source and really our region was known around the world as a really important breeding ground for these migratory fish so we have the example of river herring being used as a really important lobster bait and the Penobscot River Salmon which was a really iconic run of Atlantic salmon which are now critically endangered so unfortunately over the past several hundred years we've seen pretty drastic declines in the numbers the sheer magnitude of these sea-run fish and so this is just an example of American shad and river herring commercial landings so these are fish that were harvested commercially and then weighed and you can see the blue solid part of the graph is river herring and you can see from, sorry I don't have a pointer, but about 1950 the start of the graph all the way up until about present day there's a pretty drastic decline in numbers and American shad really follow that trajectory as well historically these fish were up and down the eastern seaboard and Maine is currently one of the last remaining states on the east coast that actually has a commercial fishery for river herring so what's really important to note is that not only do we still have these populations but we actually still have active commercial harvesting and so it's a really important economic driver in some of these coastal communities as I mentioned river herring are a really prized lobster bait so we can look at this from some more landings data this is American shad we're looking at the bottom 1887 to about the early 2000s and you can see that in 1887 we're looking on the order of 8 million kilograms of American shad landed and it's pretty close to zero down here in the 2000s but what's really interesting is if we take a look at the point in time prior to 1887 so I'm going to move us back in time a little bit more and we look at this graph so here's the point in time prior to where that graph started you can see now that those bars have dropped significantly in magnitude and if we look at 1814 we're looking at 50 billion kilograms of American shad and you see that there's a space here where there's none and interestingly enough this period of about 1814 to 1887 is when industrialization happened in Maine and a lot of dams were built on rivers so it's not surprising that there's a link here between the time when dams and the connectivity of rivers was severed and essentially the crash of the fishery so the takeaway from that information is that rivers really need to flow in order to have wildlife and fish access the habitats that they really need but also it's important for rivers to act like natural rivers so sediment moving through the rivers creating those special habitats and beaches along the riverscape moving nutrients I talked about the marine system and the freshwater system and how the fish are really that connector between the two moving nutrients fish birds and mammals also being able to move through the rivers and so if we look at general factors that impact the health of our freshwater ecosystems around the globe these things sort of rise to the top as factors that really affect the ecosystem health so things like having good water quality, a flow regime so the river flowing in a natural state is really important the ability of invasive species or the ability of native species to essentially maintain levels in the presence of invasive species of plants and animals this concept of a diversity of temperatures so warming and other thermal barriers having dynamic enough channels this is sort of a complex concept but dynamic enough channels that allow for climate adaptation so what I mean by that is rivers that are not just channeled straight stretches of river but there's sort of lots of different micro habitats that allow fish and other animals to adapt to changes in water quality and water temperature and then this concept of blocked access right it's really affecting river health and this includes large hydro dams smaller dams we have a lot of abandoned low head dams in Maine and road crossings so culverts as well and when we think about ways that from a restoration and conservation perspective that we can have the most impact in restoring the health of these systems we kind of zero in on this piece about blocked access because if we are able to allow rivers to function more naturally then we're in essence bringing back all of the other healthy factors that are really important so if we look at Maine through the lens of resilience so this is a map of the northeast United States in particular looking at the northern Appalachians and Maine so the darker colors represent places that are more resilient and the lighter colors places that are less resilient and so in this sort of climate driven analysis Maine comes out on top in terms of having really fairly well connected landscapes that are then ultimately more resilient to things like climate changes we have the most forested state in the United States which is really important for headwaters habitat we have comparatively really great water quality we look at our state across the United States and the globe as well I mentioned that we have all 12 species of native migratory fish present and they're already reproducing and maintaining in our rivers we have the last best place for eastern brook trout another native fish as well as Atlantic salmon we have relatively long connected river networks already and a diverse geography and geology multiple temperate zones we have minimal pavement right most of us know that most of Maine is either forested or agricultural and we have very few storage dams so what I mean by that is that the natural flows of our rivers are pretty well maintained when you look at Maine compared to other places in the east coast and around the globe so we sort of knew that by thinking about all of these different factors again Maine sort of rising to the top in terms of resilience and restoration potential and we sort of have the ability to really make an impact in Maine so in 2011 the Nature Conservancy did more of a scientific analysis of things that we kind of already knew that had been bubbling up to the surface about why Maine is so great in terms of freshwater connectivity and restoration potential so the study looked at 30,000 dams across the northeast United States and they were all ranked based on whether or not they had native migratory fish present what the upstream habitat looked like for these fish along the river gradients and then the number of dams per river mile and so again Maine scored really well at all of these things and in particular in the Penobscot watershed on the Penobscot River and so that was really exciting to kind of solidify the fact that yes Maine is really important when we look across the northeast United States and it has a lot of restoration potential because we kind of already have a lot of the ingredients that make for really healthy river systems so this image shows Maine stem dams in the United States this is as of 2006 so more would be shown there's a certain size criteria so this isn't showing all dams but it's sort of the big ones in the US and you can see that they're pretty ubiquitous throughout the landscape in the United States and Maine really led the way and the Edwards Dam in Augusta, Maine the removal of that structure was really a catalyst for thinking about dam removal as a means of restoring rivers and aquatic ecosystem function so in 1999 the Edwards Dam was removed on the Kennebec and it was the first Maine stem hydro facility, hydro dam to be removed essentially in the name of restoring the river system so really exciting and it got people thinking about dam removal as a tool for restoring these systems so I'd like to tell you a little story a side tributary if you will to our sort of Maine stem theme about the Sebasticook River so this is a tributary of the Kennebec river and it's seen an amazing success post dam removal of that Edwards Dam in Augusta so in 1999 prior to dam removal on the Maine stem there were zero fish counted at Benton Falls on the Sebasticook River and in 2018 we saw 3.35 million fish come through fish meaning river herring and again I mentioned how economically important river herring are for communities here in Maine we've also noticed that the Sebasticook River is now home to one of the largest populations of bald eagles in Maine and I think regionally further outside of Maine but I'm not sure exactly on that point I'm not an ornithologist but also just the fact that the community at Benton Falls is really celebrating this success story so they have now an LA Festival that happens every spring to celebrate the return of these fish and it's super exciting I don't know if anybody has an opportunity to go to the LA Festival or just to see Benton Falls on the Sebasticook River especially during the spring harvest it's really, really awesome to be able to see the fisher people out in the water and sort of loading their boats up with river herring so it's a really impressive success story that happened relatively fast after dam removal so I'm in a segue to the Penobscot River Restoration Project I mentioned this a little bit when I was talking about how great Maine is and so the Penobscot River sort of rose to the top of the top in Maine when we were looking at river restoration potential so here's an image of the Penobscot watershed in the state of Maine it's the largest watershed in Maine it covers about a third of the state and it's the second largest river in New England it's second only to the Connecticut River so there's just this immense size of the watershed and home to all 12 native species of migratory fish including three that are listed under the Endangered Species Act so Atlantic salmon, shortnose sturgeon, and Atlantic sturgeon and then I mentioned before sort of this idea of having the majority of Maine is forested and so the headwaters of the Penobscot River are really this amazingly intact forest habitat that makes for really really great headwater streams that are super important for the reproductive success of a lot of these fish and then the Penobscot Indian Nation calls the Penobscot River home so you know hundreds and thousands of years of cultural significance but also significance in terms of the fishery and the ability to catch protein sources right directly from the river so there's a lot of economic, cultural, and ecological ties to the Penobscot River and the Penobscot watershed and the health of the system so the Penobscot River Restoration Project was this unprecedented collaboration between non-profit conservation organizations state and federal agencies, the Penobscot Indian Nation, and hydropower companies and the Penobscot Project was essentially the removal of two main stem dams that were closest to the sea at VZ and Great Works in Bradley improved fish passage at several other dams on the system including a nature like fishway or a bypass designed at the Howlin Dam and I'll show you photos of that in a minute but also thinking about the balance of hydropower generation in the system and sort of maintaining the pre-project energy level generation but actually when all was said and done after the project was implemented the energy generation in the Penobscot watershed is actually slightly higher than it was pre-project and then all of this sort of in the name of restoring not only endangered Atlantic salmon but the whole suite of migratory fish and in essence restoring an ecosystem as a whole so about 2,000 miles of historic habitat were reconnected through the efforts of this project on the ground so the first of the on the ground of the Penobscot River Restoration Project was the Great Works Dam Removal in 2012 and I mentioned the Edwards Dam Removal as being a really important catalyst in this sort of idea of dam removal as a tool for river restoration and the Penobscot Project got a lot of notoriety because it was sort of this unlikely group of partners working on restoring an entire ecosystem so it really set the stage and people were paying attention around the globe to how this project was going to play out on the ground so here the second main stem dam removed in Visi in 2013 and this is an image of a couple months after the dam removal there's actually a riverside park that's been built on the shoreline in Visi the first time that the Visi community had access to the river in over 200 years was after this project and really important culturally significant site across the river from the dam for the Penobscot Indian Nation as well so just really incredible reconnections with communities and cultures in the region and this is the howlin bypass that I mentioned so the dam spans the river across here and the dam was left in place to maintain the head pond above it for recreational use and benefit to the community essentially and so this channel was built around the dam that functions much like that of the natural river system and allows fish to kind of route around the dam structure itself oh and another riverside park being built as we speak to allow the community to really connect with the river so just a visual about the fisheries habitat and the connectivity that was achieved post Penobscot river restoration project so this is in 2012 just as the project begins the lower most dams are circled here this is a photo and then May 2016 this is just after the howlin bypass is complete you can see now all of the blue expands up into the headwaters nearly 2,000 miles of accessible habitat are achieved so I'm just going to toggle back and forth for impact because I think it's really incredible to sort of visualize this on a map so we'll take another little side tributary and talk about a success that was part of the Penobscot river restoration project on a tributary called Blackman Stream in Bradley so this is at the main forest and logging museum if anybody's ever been I highly encourage you to go it's an incredible place but in 2013 there were zero fish and this is just after the main stem dam removals not quite yet to the fish passage improvements and there was actually a sort of a nature like fish way that was built at the mills there in Bradley and was able to maintain the historical integrity of the site and also allow fish passage so the main stem rivers now opened up and all of these river herring are knocking at the door and the fish passage was put in place and in 2014 there were 187,000 river herring counted at Blackman Stream and just this past year there were 540,000 fish so it's really, really incredible and again we see this sort of community engagement people are celebrating the fact that thousands of river herring hundreds of thousands of river herring are now in their small stream and you can stand on the river banks and see the fish running silver so if you haven't done it there are tons of places in Maine now that you can see this happen talk to me afterwards I can give you some tips but this in particular is a really incredible place to see it firsthand and these numbers are also being seen on the main stem river as well so Milford Dam has an innovative fish elevator and so it still remains on the main stem but allows fish to move upstream and so we're able to get fairly accurate counts of fish at this facility and so if we look at river herring from the early 2000s up until present day I've highlighted when the dam removals came out the dams came out on the Penobscot and we can see this pretty awesome upward climb of river herring numbers we're off the charts now which is really exciting so close to 3 million and we're expecting even more this spring so it's not just about the fish numbers right the Penobscot river restoration project is also really innovative and unprecedented and that a lot of time was spent within the scientific community prior to project implementation thinking about the metrics that we would really want to pay attention to if we're really going to gauge the success of this project from an ecosystem perspective so for the past decade we've also been looking at not only the fish passage and fish behavior elements but things like food web dynamics the surrounding shorelines and wetlands along either side of the river the water quality itself and the physical channel geomorphology what happens when you take a dam out of a river in the case of the Penobscot, not much actually and so those were sort of the core parameters in thinking about the ecosystem but as the project continues to unfold we're also looking at things like the human element as recreation expanded because of the Penobscot river restoration project looking at passage at the remaining hydro facilities that are still in operation are there ways that we can tweak operations or make improvements and then touching on sort of the marine connection and looking at the effects in Penobscot Bay trickling out all of these hundreds and millions of fish that are now connected to the Gulf of Maine what are the impacts that we're having in that direction as well and so it's been a really incredible example of in a very short amount of time so I mentioned the howlin bypass was complete in 2016 so only a couple of years after this major river restoration project we're already seeing these fish and wildlife species rebounding and so it's been a really incredible place to really view what ecosystem restoration looks like but dams are not the only problem in the Penobscot so this map shows you all of the road stream crossings in the Penobscot watershed and I don't actually know the total number but it's a lot and so you can imagine if you're a fish say a brook trout and you're swimming upstream and you're having grand old time and you're eating and all of a sudden you're trying to move up to where you're going to meet your mate and spawn and reproduce and you come across something like this so a salmon may be able to jump through that but most of the other species probably can't and so this is a significant barrier to being able to access those really important habitats and so we've been thinking a lot over the past decade about how do we know what's out there there's hundreds of thousands of road crossings in Maine and I challenge you to find one on your way home tonight I'm sure you will and so how do we start to even think about the impacts of restoring the rest of the headwaters habitat outside of the scope of the Maine stem of the river so enter TNC's seasonal stream barrier assessment crew which I've had the pleasure of managing the past several years so for the past decade we've employed a crew of four seasonal employees and they've surveyed nearly every single road stream crossing in the state of Maine here's our current barrier status map and the green is our completed survey area so we're at about 90% of the state of Maine over 25,000 surveys and so we're looking at not only road stream crossings from a fish passage perspective but also from a condition perspective so looking at the road around it the size, the dimensions of the culverts and we know now based on this data that we've collected that 56% of these road stream crossings are complete barriers to fish passage year round and it's even more than that when we look at different times of the year and what are barriers to not only fish but wildlife as well it's not only about the fish and wildlife we are sort of looking at these road stream crossings through the lens of fish passage but what we're finding is that it's also really important to think about implications for humans and communities as well so these are places where not only are the culverts improperly sized or placed for fish but they're also having significant impacts on our communities so culverts that are improperly designed have a higher tendency of washing out during a flood and so by measuring all of these road stream crossings we're able to get at this information as well which is really important and super tangible especially when we have a lot of situations in Maine where if one road washes out we've wiped out emergency service access for an entire community so it's really important to think about it not only from an ecological perspective of connectivity but from a human perspective as well so we've developed things like we call decision support tools or barrier prioritization tools so we essentially take all of this data that we're collecting out in the field and we feed it into these models and basically we can prioritize projects places where we want to do restoration that would restore not only the best habitat for fish and wildlife but also thinking about identifying the road risk element as well and then it also can guide other people so the nature conservancy isn't about to go out and replace 225,000 road stream crossings in the state of Maine so it allows us to work with municipalities other conservation organizations to really critically think about where the funding and the rubber hits the road and where that's going to have the biggest impact for not only fish but for communities as well and so these tools sort of feed into this larger theme that I hope you're sensing about connecting the people with the ecological and river restoration elements so this past no two years ago we worked to develop a short sort of film that would convey the meaning behind river restoration for communities in Maine so I just want to play that for you really quickly we measure distance and miles we measure time in minutes but how do you measure the health of a river? one way to do it is with ale wives every year these little fish swim up from the Gulf of Maine to spawn becoming the base of a huge food chain and the further they make it upstream the more they connect with birds other fish animals and people along the way but it's a tough journey old dams, blocked road culverts ale wives get stuck and that's where groups like the Nature Conservancy come in you see all across the state river restoration groups are working with towns and landowners on fish friendly passages so ale wives can get back to places they haven't been in more than a hundred years and local communities can celebrate their growing numbers a decade ago our rivers were pretty quiet but with the help of people like you millions of fish are now making their way back which means our rivers are healthier than they've been in a long time there's a once in a lifetime comeback happening in Maine right now help us keep it going side note, I don't know if you know of the ghost of Paul Revere a local band so they did the background music for this which was really cool it's really great to be working in Maine at a point where we're celebrating successes and these river restoration projects as I mentioned have had these really short windows from completion to seeing these incredible populations of fish rebounding so it's a really exciting time and I also mentioned that the Nature Conservancy is an international organization and as you can imagine there's rivers around the globe that are facing really similar issues to what we have here in Maine so we started to really think about how does the work and the successes that we've had and seen already here in Maine how do we sort of build on those and translate those around the globe so here I have an image of the world and the green shading on the continents indicates the fish species richness so essentially the biodiversity of fish and the dots on the map are showing you places where dams currently exist where they're under construction or where they're planned and so the blue is where they exist orange is under construction and the red is planned dams and if we look at where the majority of these dots fall they're kind of scary in the places where there's really great biodiversity of fish and so we have to really think about taking the concepts from our example of the Penobscot River Restoration Project and the ability to think bigger than a single dam and thinking about it from a regional or even ecosystem perspective and thinking about the ability to sort of balance where dams are going in where they might come out and thinking about that from a fisheries and a biodiversity restoration perspective but also thinking about it from an alternative energy source that is hydro so we can't totally discount hydro altogether but we've been the Nature Conservancy has really started to coin the concept hydro power by design so it's sort of essentially a proactive, thoughtful prioritization about where dams are going in where they can come out and how that has minimal impacts for maintaining biodiversity especially for fish so I just wanted to highlight that there are two places in particular around the globe that people still rely incredibly heavily on rivers for I mean this happens all over the globe but these two areas in particular are rivers for their main source of protein so essentially fish from the rivers is a main food source and if we look at the Mekong for example here over 40 million people rely on fish from that river as their main source of protein so again it's that human link so not only are we thinking about maintaining and restoring biodiversity but noting the facts and incorporating the fact that there are still millions of people that rely on these fish for food and if we look at data from the Living Planet report done by the World Wildlife Foundation in 2006 there's a general decline in vertebrate species worldwide mammals are seeing mammals, amphibians and fish are also seeing negative declines of varying scales amphibians are sort of having the most at 81% decline and this is from 1970 to 2012 is when it was analyzed so looking at the trends over that time period if we pull out migratory fish from that report or that index from the World Wildlife Foundation we see that over time again it's that 1970 to 2012 there's a pretty steady decline until we get to the end and then we're starting to get hope again and this is essentially really directly attributed to river restoration so our ability to reconnect river systems is increasing although a general decline increasing migratory fish so I mentioned the Penobscot river restoration project is being unprecedented and it really was and it was looked at very carefully around the globe people were really really paying attention to what was happening this was a major project since the project even during the project we've had really keen interest from around the world in thinking about taking the concepts of maintaining hydropower and sort of balancing energy generation with dam removal and fisheries and ecosystem restoration we've had delegates visit from China India, Sweden, Germany the Netherlands they've come to Maine to stand on the banks of the Penobscot and talk with the experts and those who actually implemented the project and see firsthand how we did it so that's really exciting and thinking about that Josh Royte of the Nature Conservancy who was supposed to give this talk started connecting with this guy Herman Vonnegan from the Netherlands and the two of them really shared this common vision of this is a worldwide problem or a worldwide challenge how do we elevate and get more attention about migratory fish and really the importance of restoring free flowing rivers but connecting people to their rivers as well so Herman was the founder of the World Fish Migration Day and I'll tell you more about that in a minute but I just want to add that Herman is this super spunky super driven incredibly passionate person this is a photo of him meeting the King of Finland so the King of Finland is on the left and Herman decided to bring him a stuffed sturgeon as like a token and a way to get the King of Finland excited about World Fish Migration Day so between he and Josh there is a ton of passion and really exciting things happening about World Fish Migration Day and again networking river restoration practitioners and communities and thinking about how we get work done and how we celebrate the work that's being done so can I see a show of hands of people who have heard about World Fish Migration Day okay so about half how many of you who have heard about it have attended an event for World Fish Migration Day okay four five so now you know about it World Fish Migration Day is a one day global celebration that's really all about creating awareness of migratory fish and again the importance of free flowing rivers and connecting people to rivers so it's a really exciting it's a really exciting day a really exciting celebration and it started in 2014 so the Nature Conservancy in Maine became an international partner so with Herman he really brought it to a global level and so we've been investing the Nature Conservancy in Maine since inception in 2014 and we've hosted events in Maine since then and so over the course of World Fish Migration Day they've sort of pulled in these sort of celebrity ambassadors and scientific ambassadors and so this is just an example of animal planets, river monsters Zeb Hogan from National Geographic is also a sponsor as well and an ambassador of World Fish Migration Day and so the more people we can make aware of the problems faced by fish the more chance we have to find solutions so I don't know about you but I think about fish a lot but I can imagine that most of you probably don't think about fish before you go to bed at night so just sort of raising the awareness of what the challenges are and how we can think about solutions so just examples of World Fish Migration Day, events across the globe running the gamut from scientific talks and presentations and conferences to engaging kids in coloring contests and snapping selfies with Flatfish Stanley from the US Fish and Wildlife Service we had really really awesome events here in Maine so the I should mention World Fish Migration Day happens every other year so 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 and hopefully many more but there have been a lot of events so I mentioned the Benton Allway Festival and the Bradley Allway Festival that were sort of already happening in Maine we were kind of lucky in that the fish are being celebrated already and so we've worked really hard as TNC in Maine to tap people into this World Fish Migration Day because it's a global network so just examples of events from the UK, Mongolia, Bolivia, Ethiopia and Korea people doing really creative things all about raising awareness and really celebrating the rivers and the fish this is a picture of the World Fish Migration Day in Gabon TNC is working in Gabon on river restoration projects and so these are people that TNC folks have worked with directly and they encourage the young people in the region to participate in World Fish Migration Day they've incorporated a curriculum in the school in Gabon as well so really exciting thinking about engaging young people and children in this effort as well and all of the things that they can learn about not only their river but rivers around the globe so 2018 there were 570 World Fish Migration Day events over 3,000 organizations 63 countries around the globe and there's sort of a squishy like social media reach but it was anticipated or predicted that it was 50 to 70 million people at least saw pictures of World Fish Migration Day events through their social media so it's really impressive this is built from the 2014 the initial year and so it's really been growing every year since and this is the action item for you tonight think about May 2020 and how you might join this join a celebration or even host a celebration of your own for World Fish Migration Day and I'll hit you with that again a little bit later so the first World Fish Migration Day was such an incredible success and just really started to cement this network of people who really care about migratory fish they really care about the health of river ecosystems and they want to talk with one another and see and hear about successes that are happening around the globe so Herman and Josh and others move towards the idea of not just a day but now there's a World Fish Migration Foundation and from that foundation there are lots of other efforts that have been continuing and sort of building on the success of World Fish Migration Day as just an event a day into something more so there are examples there was a creation of the swimways of the world as an educational piece I actually have copies of it as a poster on the table so feel free to grab one as you leave it's pretty cool illustrated just sort of the migratory fish around the world and different examples of what that looks like on the different continents the sea to source guidebook is another example I'll talk about that in a second and then these sort of two other satellite projects the amber project and dam removal Europe so these are all things that stem from World Fish Migration Day but sort of now fall under the objectives of the World Fish Migration Foundation so this is the poster that I have available and it's just a great like conversation tool and it's really exciting to be able to hand this out to school groups teachers love this so if you know and love a teacher maybe take an extra one with you just a really neat interactive tool for talking about migratory fish and the swimways of the world the sea to source guidebook so I have a copy here if you're super curious there's also a free digital download of this and Josh Roy was one of the co-editors of this book and there are just really awesome picture examples of projects around the globe and again it's sort of building this concept of a network of river restoration practitioners and people that are generally interested in river restoration so I have a copy if anybody wants to take a look afterwards this book has been a really huge success it's been translated into multiple languages the most recent was a translation into Mandarin Chinese so people are really excited about this and excited that there's a sort of a one-stop shop for learning about river restoration projects around the globe and it's slated to have a so this is the 2.0 version and there will be other iterations as well as more and more projects happen so I mentioned dam removal Europe so this was another project that stemmed from the world fish migration day and the world fish migration foundation dam sort of normalizing and publicizing dam removal as a tool for ecological and river restoration Europe in itself has over 30,000 obsolete dams so I mentioned that we have a lot of sort of remnant and abandoned low head dams in Maine there's a lot in Europe so the Europeans are now thinking about it places like Finland, Sweden, France the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and sort of elevating again this sort of idea of dam removal as a tool the Amber project so the adaptive management of barriers and European rivers and I could not of me remember this in any talk that I've ever given so I wrote it up here this time so that's what Amber stands for and essentially they're thinking about collecting data at road stream crossings and putting it into a tool that would allow them to map it across Europe and think about prioritizing removals and restoration projects across the landscape does that sound a little bit familiar to what I've told you about what we've done here in Maine so this is sort of a direct application of the things that we've been doing in Maine as a conservation community are now being applied in Europe which is super exciting so Josh serves as a scientific expert on their panel and so these folks have convened there's actually I think there's two people two or three people from the United States that are sort of guiding the process for a whole bunch of collaborators in Europe to think about prioritizing removals and restoration projects in Europe and so these are some of the examples that have come out of this Amber project so there's actually nine projects in Europe that are slated for either fish passage improvements, hydro enhancements dam removals and they're sort of across Europe so it's really exciting that not only are they thinking about ways to prioritize but they've already identified and they've started on nine projects and just a quick example of one of these projects in France so this is an existing dam structure that's a pretty severe barrier to fish passage this is actually one of the great salmon rivers in France so sort of a similar story to what we see here in Maine this is a engineered drawing of what the or a simulation of what the dam would look like after fish passage improvements and hydro enhancements so what's happening here is they're essentially reducing the head height of this dam structure which allows for not only better fish passage but it also allows them to totally redo the antiquated hydro technology that was in the dam and so they're actually generating more or they will be generating more hydro power at this facility and they also have increased fish passage in particular for salmon so these are the types of things that we have really been able to bring on an international scale from the work that we've been doing in Maine and thinking about again that sort of balancing hydro power with the needs of the ecosystem and how that plays out in real time so this is happening as we speak in France and so the one other thing that I just want to highlight about our rivers and sort of thinking about the work that we've done and are still doing, we still have a lot of work to do here in Maine is connected across the landscape so not only the fish and the wildlife and the health of the river and aquatic system itself but thinking about again the way it connects to people, the way it connects to renewable energy, connection around the globe and sort of bringing our story and then connection to the ocean environment as well I mentioned that sort of marine, the Gulf of Maine connection between our freshwater habitat and what we've really come to realize is that the only way to get this work done especially in Maine is connecting with the people and the communities that we're doing the work in so whether it's meeting with people at the state house to hosting family events on the Sheepscott River to celebrate the dam removal projects that are happening there to engaging and likely partners, road commissioners soil and water conservation districts to be on the ground with shovels and helping us in these restoration projects to engaging the scientific community and thinking about how do we document the impacts that are ecological and river restoration projects are happening it's really really rising to the top that it's so critical to engage people in this work and so the moment you've all been waiting for that I mentioned at the very beginning. So this is a trailer the World Fish Migration Foundation has worked with a documentarian is that a word? Documentarian filmmaker to make a film about World Fish Migration Day and it's being currently shown in the next two weeks at the DC International Film Festival it's been asked to be part of the Wild and Scenic Film Festival and so this is a I wanted to like try and show you the actual film but I wasn't allowed until it hits the DC circuit for the Film Festival so you'll have to make do with a teaser trailer and know that we're thinking about ways in particular this spring Herman Vonagon is actually going to visit us here in Maine so we're thinking about trying to host a film showing possibly in Brunswick because it's very convenient for us TNC folks and having a panel discussion and sort of a meet and greet with Herman after that so keep that in mind but without further ado a trailer for the documentary and you will see our very own Josh Royte World Fish Migration Day is a series of global events held on even years to bring awareness of the importance of free flowing rivers and migratory fish around this common theme connecting rivers fish and people this year World Fish Migration Day consisted of 552 events in 63 countries around the world there was a global headquarters in Helsinki Finland and there were continental headquarters it was one in Africa that was in Kruger Park of South Africa in Bolivia for South America along the Mekong River for Asia there was another one in India and one in Australia my job was to meet up with some of the US leaders in river restoration from the US Forest Service NOAA US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service from the banks of the Potomac I headed out into the field to join the amazing Richmond World Fish Migration Day event the lead coordinator for this event was an amazing woman Kathy Hoberman she's a senior stream restoration designer for KCI Engineering Kathy has this rare mix of engineering chops and ecological passion making her a great person to evaluate a river and find ways to make it work both for the life in the stream and the people around it it was in 2016 when they had the happy fish at the conference this is awesome I've got to host one of these in my town World Fish Migration Day brings people to rivers with an excitement for restoring them and these massive migrations of fish when I see kids and adults like me acting just like kids totally engaged and beaming with awe I realized there's a lot of hope in our rivers it's an amazing time to be living and working around rivers a time when rivers are being brought back to life and connections are being restored between fish and wildlife around our rivers and when people are engaging again with the very cradles of our civilization cities and towns that were built around rivers I love World Fish Migration Day for bringing us together connecting rivers fish and people the first time I saw that trailer I was in Australia this past December at the international conference on river connectivity with Herman and Zephogan from National Geographic and we played it in front of a room of 90 people just the trailer and I was standing there and there were tears streaming down my face I was so excited that there was a visual artistic way to articulate the meaning behind World Fish Migration Day that really everybody could relate to so if I have inspired you in any way to think about hosting or participating in a World Fish Migration Day event May 16, 2020 is the date if I further inspire you to make any sort of financial contribution either toward the Nature Conservancy in Maine or the World Fish Migration Foundation please come see me afterwards but really most importantly it's about participating in these events not only hosting that which is kind of a step up but just going to one of them so go to the Dan Ruskata Allway Festival go see the fish run at Blackman Stream in Bradley it's a really unique place on the globe that we can see the impact of conservation and restoration happening in real time so I encourage you in a couple of weeks hopefully someone will get here to go out and really see this for yourself and I will leave you with one of the people who is most happy about river restoration this is my daughter Clara and I could not put a picture of her and then one other just a couple of upcoming events so 2019 is actually the year of the salmon the international year of the salmon and so it is just a time and a place to really think about Atlantic salmon restoration so we have a lot of events going on lots of our partner organizations are also hosting events in the name of international year of the salmon there's one tomorrow so the kickoff event in Maine for an international year of the salmon is happening at the Maine Discovery Museum in Bangor tomorrow night so if you happen to be in Bangor tomorrow night stop by and also March 17th as part of the Maine Science Festival I'm hosting a panel of river restoration fisheries restoration experts here in Maine Josh will be there so if you want to meet Josh March 17th in Bangor he'll be there so Mark your calendars and then just I wanted to throw a couple of the websites so that if you want more information you can visit those and with that I will take any questions thank you happily and I just want to say to you I have been to many presentations I am the most critical person in the presentation it was my job and you did a fantastic job I still really have to tell you that and anyway and the project is great I do have a question the dams that came down is the hydroelectric power that they provided you don't give it a that to you as you eliminate the dams correct so those were hydro facilities and the power generation was actually shifted to other dams that are already in place in the system just by improving the infrastructure that was already in place so new turbines went in so overall the power generation was maintained and it's actually better than it was for the project thank you so much I appreciate it you really did a fantastic job thank you yeah thanks for the nice talk you didn't mention the forest products industry and logging and their role in all of this because I'm assuming that there's a lot of that happening in the whole Propscut River watershed yeah so it's still there I think the important takeaway is thinking about the connection with communities in the river the idea that we're not going to abolish hydro generation we're not going to essentially change means economy that was founded in forest products so it's still maintained but thinking about being careful in the interactions that those industries have with the ecosystem health does that sort of answer your question constantly is there any role that it plays in the ecosystem health definitely I would say you know especially in terms of water quality but we're also I think in general seeing a shift in some of the industry I mean we know that we've seen we're not for example rocks down the river anymore a lot of our pulp and paper mills have been closing and are sort of shifting and transitioning into new industry so I think some of the issues are sort of being remediated on their own just with an economic shift but yeah this is not in your wheelhouse but I'm wondering if you know anything about how dam technology and the hydro power technology has changed has it evolved at all since were there dams women was anyone thinking about how do you make a dam that creates power with less impact on a river yeah so I would actually go back to let's see if I can do it quickly the example in France of that dam they're thinking about sort of implementing new age hydro technology that allows the head height of the dam to be reduced so the head pond behind it is acting more like a river so you have increased fish passage and also increased power generation so there are ways to think about that from a hydro perspective but what's really important to not think about is not thinking about these on a case by case basis but really proactive planning and thinking about how these individual hydro dams play out from a landscape perspective and how they interact with one another within a given river system great question thank you yeah not that one in particular but a lot of these fish species are they do have cyclical life histories so like river herring for example have a three to four year reproductive maturity so it takes about three to four years before the next generation is really up and moving into the river so that may have that may have played into it in some cases it's interesting when we think about returns on the Penobscot River in particular we are now in the first year of fish that are reproducing that have only seen a free flowing lower Penobscot river so fish that were born just after the dam removals and are reproducing again so it's really exciting to think about that from sort of that species cyclical change and I imagine that would have played into that spike in 1994 but I can't really say yes because I grew up in the river due to the late usually 90s it was like two a year but my mom was like none a year so that's actually a really great question and it's a really important issue especially for the Penobscot Indian nation as you can imagine their subsistence fishing and their maintenance of their tree rights on the Penobscot river so I know there's a scientist at the Penobscot Indian nation who's worked with the EPA in doing assessments of basically contaminants within the fish populations to get a more accurate number of the fish that are actually edible and it is a really it's a problem right here relying solely on fish from the Penobscot river as your main food source I think the numbers are still pretty low in terms of what is a consumable number per year and that's something that played a really important role in the Penobscot nation as a really key partner in the Penobscot river restoration project this idea of restoring not only the numbers of fish but the water quality and sort of the general ecosystem health of the river because it has such important food and cultural meaning to them so great question what's the working process like for counting fish like are you tracking individual pictures that you gather them and your counting as you go through yeah so there's numerous ways that we can count them the most simplistic is places like the Milford dam that I mentioned so on the main stem Penobscot there's actually a fish elevator so the fish swim in and they're lifted up over the dam and in that process they're actually they're swimming through a viewing window and so we can video and count them that way in some of the smaller tributaries there's actually tubes set up in the river so that individual fish have to swim through the tubes and they're counted as they swim through and then in other places people are on rotating volunteer schedules with clickers and so they're looking at a particular space in the river and they're counting the number of LWI's that go through so there's kind of a range of our technologies for counting the fish the fish the salmon and sturgeon and American shad we do have active tagging programs in collaboration with the University of Maine so we are able to put actual tagging devices on those fish and count them that way but that one's more about sort of where they're actually moving and not necessarily the numbers of fish and so the numbers that you see are from the Department of Marine Resources and really are a conservative best guess we know that there are a lot more fish in the system but this is our best guess and sort of maintaining that conservative estimate of what the numbers are yes in developing countries does the World Bank have a role in the positive or negative are they encouraging to fans or are they that that's a really great question that's unfortunately out of my area of expertise yeah great question I'm not sure how has that changed in those types of cycles so what's interesting is that I mentioned that a lot of the natural flow regime is actually pretty intact in Maine there are a few dams that are actually storage dams where they're storing a large amount of water above the dam and sort of having time releases of when that flow moves through the main stem dams like on the Penobscot for example are called run of the river dams in that they're allowing essentially the natural flow in terms of the amount of water moved through the system to be maintained so there aren't really like on the Penobscot river when we took out the dams it didn't necessarily change the flow regime that much because they're what they weren't storage dams to begin with so we don't see a lot of flooding that we might expect in other places especially out west when they have they have a lot of storage behind the dams so they have to think about how that impacts the system when the dams are removed how would you describe the challenge first by community that takes it's not an uncommon challenge especially in Maine I would use the Howland Fish Bypass as an example so that particular upstream that was created by the Howland Dam in place is sort of the center of town in Howland so I don't know if you've ever been there but the houses are surrounding that it functions as essentially a lake on the river so people are boating, they're fishing and they're really tied to the fact that this head pond or the head water of the dam has been there for hundreds of years so people in general I think especially in Maine are fairly resistant to change it's sort of this fear of the unknown well if you take the dam out what the heck is my river going to look like and so in the case of the Howland Bypass it's really about thinking creatively about it compromise so the dam was actually it's maintained in the river it still keeps the integrity of that the encoulement above but the Fish Bypass is routed around the dam and that functions very much like a natural river system a natural channel it's not necessarily a solution in all cases to sort of around the dam but in places where there is a lot of challenge and a lot of resistance to change I think thinking really creatively about what a compromising what a compromise would look like is really important so with both the large projects and the smaller dam removals who usually pays for those especially when it's just for returning the sea-run ability for the fish so we could probably write a book on the varying funding sources available for anything ranging from a culvert to a full dam removal and full project implementation like the PROMSCOT in the case of the PROMSCOT it was a mix and in the end it was about 50-50 public and private funding so there was a lot of support from federal agencies like NOAA in terms of that project and the implementation of that service but then we had really significant private donations from people who have lived in or grew up in Maine and were really excited about thinking about restoring a river system and I mentioned early in the presentation the idea of TNC sort of thinking about policy from a permitting, protection and funding perspective and so water bond and the ability to use that as a funding source for communities when they're looking at replacing road culverts and thinking about doing that in a way that's benefitting not only the community but the fish as well so it really kind of runs the gamut in terms of public and private and also we do grants as well we apply for help municipalities apply through grant programs so thank you our local river important is that there's upscot and then the Sacrapodail will be removed soon in Westbrook but I'm just wondering if there's any other dams that are coming up soon that are kind of in the old life or major fish passage or removal of an upscot or can it affect anyone else? yeah so on the chubescot yep she had an expert in the room the chubescot river in mid coast I mean is actually under a restoration project is underway thinking about multiple dams and sort of dam removal and fish passage improvements there so that's really very exciting and fairly close to home I can't think of any other dam removals off the top of my head but we've been doing a lot of work thinking about how to build on a momentum created in a upscot watershed and thinking about road stream crossings in particular so we have really tended to focus our efforts in the past couple of years on continuing the connectivity in that watershed and looking at not just dams but road crossings as well so that's a really great question and I would encourage you to check out nature.org slash main or check out our Facebook page because we update our social media and we love to let people know when projects are coming up and the things that are exciting to know. I'll just mention too that I'm involved with the Przomska river and we do have events that are part of the World Fish Migration Day so people can go to przomskariver.org and check that out. Nice, thank you. One more. Miranda? I'm curious about that awful sea run that gave us favorites and maybe oh wow. It's like picking my favorite kid. So I did my master's research on blueback herring so river herring or alewife and blueback herring collectively are known as river herring and blueback herring are kind of like the step kid because most people in Maine know what alewife it is or are and most people haven't necessarily heard of a blueback herring so bluebacks are my favorite and they are slightly different from alewives even though they're lumped into the same general river herring category they have slightly different life histories and I think that makes them really cool and they're super hard to tell apart so if you have an alewife and a blueback herring visually it's almost impossible to tell them apart so yeah they fly under the radar and I like that. Great question. Thank you all so much.