The winter issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, features an article highlighting several science-forward initiatives happening in Acadia National Park.

Among them: vegetation restoration on Acadia’s summits, invasive plant management in Bass Harbor Marsh, sweetgrass gathering and co-stewardship with the Wabanaki, the impacts and response to a duo of powerful storms in January 2024, and Resist-Accept-Direct framework that helps inform decisions made by park managers.

Friends of Acadia is proud to be a partner in science with Acadia and Schoodic Institute, helping to move these initiatives forward so researchers can learn as they go and help park ecosystems remain resilient.

Here’s a snippet from the Sierra article (read the full story on the Sierra Club website)

The combination of Acadia’s vulnerability to the rising sea and its rank among the most visited national parks in the country have made it a laboratory for a policy that the National Park Service adopted in 2021 to confront the climate crisis on federally managed lands nationwide. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework is named for the three broad strategies that resource managers are being encouraged to use to either rehabilitate damaged park facilities or prepare them for anticipated changes brought on by spiking temperatures, ecosystem destabilization, and coastal erosion. Managing land this way goes hand in hand with President Joe Biden’s 2021 policy order that seeks to rectify the federal government’s chronic disregard for the continent’s original inhabitants. For Acadia, that means decisions about how to prepare Mount Desert Island for its tumultuous future must be made in consultation with the Wabanaki, a confederacy of the four federally recognized nations whose ancestors have lived in what is now Maine since the last ice age: the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot.

The combination of the RAD framework and Biden’s 2021 order represents a seismic shift in the National Park Service’s approach to conservation. Rather than managing toward some fictional past when the landscape existed without any people on it, superintendents such as Acadia’s Kevin Schneider are learning from the Indigenous history of the land they oversee as they plan for a warming world. Acadia has become a leader in this transition—in part through its partnership with the Schoodic Institute, a nonprofit research center—by both initiating one of the nation’s first RAD processes and stepping out of the way so the Wabanaki can harvest culturally significant sweetgrass from the park’s wetlands.

Read the full story in Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club: This National Park Is a Lab for Climate Change Mitigation Efforts

Learn more about:

Vegetation restoration on Acadia’s summits: Research and Resiliency in Acadia

Repairing Maple Spring Trail using the RAD framework: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maple Spring?

Creating Co-Stewardship: Gathering with Wabanaki Nations

The impacts – and response – in Acadia following January’s storms: Taken by Storm