Cobscook Bay, Gulf of Maine, USA
Assessing Intertidal Macroinvertebrate Communities of Cobscook Bay and the Maine Coast
P.I. Thomas J. Trott, Ph.D.
Most of the shoreline of the Gulf of Maine is made up of the 5,400-mile coast of the state of Maine, not including the shoreline of the 3,500 islands that lie off the Maine coast. This complex and convoluted coastline is home to diverse near shore habitats and their equally diverse plant and animal communities. Signs of change in the local and regional ecosystems of the Gulf of Maine are surfacing. For example, over fishing, land development, and pollution are three man-made affects, which have impacted stocks of commercially important species in a measurable way. This noticeable shift in landings prompted a long-term inshore trawl survey to monitor fish stocks. What remains invisible, however, are the changes in shore communities, especially species of noncommercial value. This project will begin to fill that niche by initiating a coastal monitoring program.
A priority of this project is to document intertidal diversity of coastal Maine near shore habitats by gathering records published in peer reviewed publications, government reports, and unpublished species lists of academics and incorporating this information into the NaGISA database. This knowledge of coastal biodiversity on both local and regional scales is a necessary step for selecting appropriate sampling locations along coastal Maine. Following this idea for deciding where to sample, this project will sample a near shore community in Cobscook Bay, Maine, a macrotidal estuary located near the US/Canada border, using the NaGISA protocol. This will expand NaGISA into the Gulf of Maine and help to initiate a long-term monitoring program for a unique ecosystem that has the highest biodiversity of any area on the eastern seaboard of the United States north of the tropics.