The Gulf of Maine is an international watershed in the North Atlantic stretching north from Provincetown at the tip of Massachusetts Bay in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to Cape Sable on the Bay of Fundy in the province of Nova Scotia in Canada. For over 13,000 years, the Gulf has been developed around access to the coast for fishing, trading, and recreation. Today, these coastal development patterns put the cultural landscapes, economies, communities, and aging infrastructure systems along the Gulf at risk.
Climate Futures on the Gulf of Maine uses place-based scenario planning to illustrate the risks, vulnerabilities, and plausible futures for ten infrastructure systems along the rim of the Gulf. Place-based scenario planning is a method of long-term strategic planning that creates representations of multiple, plausible futures that are used to inform decision-making in the present. While complementary to probabilistic models used to forecast future vulnerabilities, scenario-based planning shifts emphasis from statistical probability to ways of thinking about the future. The goal of place-based scenario planning is not to predict the most likely outcome, but to reveal biases and blind spots in complex and non-linear situations.
Climate Futures uses the medium of landscape representation to surface the cultural value systems embedded in existing infrastructural systems, and position landscape as a driver when evaluating design from individual infrastructures to the Gulf of Maine watershed.
Systems > Green Space
GREEN SPACE
Green spaces 1 in the Gulf of Maine range from privately owned, publicly inaccessible conservation lands and land trusts to federal national parks in both the United States 2 and Canada. 3 In addition to federally owned properties, state, provincial, and municipal parks and beaches provide spaces for recreation.
Many of these places, especially in coastal areas, have been designed with dams, dikes, levees, locks, breakwaters, bulkheads, jetties, erosion control measures, and retaining walls. 4 These places have been shaped by humans, and provide ecosystem services, including negating the heat island effect in urban areas, offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, and attenuating stormwater, as well as providing spaces for human interaction, recreation and physical activity, and rest. 5 These landscapes have changed rapidly, and the ecological baseline 6 has shifted over the past 400 years as interior areas of the Gulf have reforested after a decline in agricultural production in the twentieth century. 7
Many of these landscapes, particularly those in the southern Gulf of Maine watershed, face intense development pressures. Land conservation efforts have been strongest in northern, eastern, and western regions of Maine, but lag in more populous coastal areas where the conserved tracts tend to be smaller and scattered due to high land values, existing development, and sprawl development pressures. 8 At the same time, these developments are resource intensive, and extract timber that is produced in the northern areas of the region and transported to the southern watershed. Decentralized conservation strategies may increase the amount of permanently protected land while actively managing forests to produce timber for construction closer to ongoing urban development. 9 Other infrastructure systems on the Gulf are dependent on the ecosystem services that green spaces provide at a watershed scale, which requires increased coordination across governments, organizations, tribes, and individuals to ensure that conservation and adaptation measures in upland areas do not negatively impact habitat or adaptation measures in downstream areas. 10
Green spaces on the Gulf of Maine illustrate the challenges in balancing conservation, management, land use priorities, and development in a watershed whose ecology has been shaped and changed by humans for 13,000 years. 11
1 There is no commonly agreed upon definition of green space, and many scientists and designers interpret the term in different ways, referring to green space as “nature” and green space as “urban vegetated space.” Urban ecologists Lucy Taylor and Dieter F. Hochuli recommend that green space is explicitly defined using quantitative and qualitative criteria for size, ownership, landscape, ecological information, access, amenities, and tree cover. In this report, green space refers to public and privately owned land in the United States and Canada that is covered by at least 40% vegetation. Lucy Taylor and Dieter F. Hochuli, “Defining Greenspace: Multiple Uses across Multiple Disciplines,” Landscape and Urban Planning 18 (2017): 25–38.
2 Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine is the only United States National Park. In addition to the Park, the Gulf hosts Cape Cod National Seashore and several National Wildlife Refuges: Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge, Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, and Parker River National Wildlife Refuge.
3 Fundy National Park in New Brunswick is owned and operated by Parks Canada, which also administers Grand-Pré National Historic Site on the Bay of Fundy, Melanson Settlement National Historic Site, and Fort Anne National Historic Site in Nova Scotia. Grand-Pré National Historic Site includes the Grand Pré marshes and archaeological sites where the Acadian aboiteaux system was first developed. These cultural landscapes terraformed salt marshes into agricultural land in the 17th century.
4 Adaptive strategies, including living shorelines are designed and installed across the Gulf. The Woods Hole Group defines a living shoreline as “a set of coastal erosion control practices, ranging from non-structural vegetated approaches to hybrid hard structural/restorative natural methods that address erosion and inundation in a manner that improves or protects the ecological condition of the coastline.” Woods Hole Group, Living Shorelines in New England: State of the Practice (Boston, MA: Woods Hole Group, 2017).
5 See Andrew Chee Keng Lee, Hannah C. Jordan, and Jason Horsley, “Value of Urban Green Spaces in Promoting Healthy Living and Wellbeing: Prospects for Planning,” Risk Mangaement in Healthcare Policy 8 (2015): 131–37.
6 Ecological baselines are important to understand how the environment has changed over time. Shifting baseline syndrome refers to the gradual lowering in accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment. Without past data, memories, or experience with historic conditions, members of each generation accept environmentally degraded conditions as being normal. Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly first identified the concept of “shifting baseline syndrome” in 1995, describing how fishers and marine scientists use the catch size and species composition in the beginning of their careers as a baseline to compare overtime. Pauly used anecdotes from fishers, as well as local studies, to illustrate how many fish species have been extirpated over time. See Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries,” Journal of Ecology and Evolution 10, no. 10 (1995: 430).
7 David R. Foster and John D. Aber, eds., Forests in Time: The Environmental Consequences of 1,000 Years of Change in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
8 Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment, “Coastal Land Use and Development,” State of the Gulf of Maine (Ogunquit, ME: Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment, 2013): 12, www.gulfofmaine.org/2/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/coastal-land-use-theme-paper.pdf.
9 Caitlin Littlefield et al., “Beyond the ‘Illusion of Preservation’: Taking Regional Responsibility by Protecting Forests, Reducing Consumption, and Expanding Ecological Forestry in New England” (Burlington: University of Vermont, 2024), masswoods.org/sites/default/files/Beyond-the-Illusion-of-Preservation-web.pdf.
10 The Gulf’s rivers connect the ocean, especially through aquatic connectivity and fish passage, which use the same waterways as public drinking water supplies. Green spaces and buffers around water supplies provide benefits for water, wastewater, public health and power systems. See Charles S. Colgan, Damon Yakovleff, and Samuel B Merrill, “An Assessment of the Economics of Natural and Built Infrastructure for Water Resources in Maine” (Portland, ME: University of Southern Maine and New England Environmental Finance Center, 2013).
11 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).