The Plants of Acadia National Park by Glen H. Mittelhauser

They are gaining important insights that are advancing science and informing the management of Acadia and other national parks. Today, researchers recognize the value in these early studies, and have begun revisiting some of those data sets early researchers left behind. His study yielded the niche differentiation theory and his main figure from that study has appeared in virtually every ecology textbook since the 1960s. In the 1950s Robert MacArthur studied warbler feeding habits in the park. It has been an important contributor to studies of bird migration and animal ecology. Acadia served as the setting for the first popular guide to the intertidal zone and first illustration of an intertidal food web. At the same time the park was protected, they helped to establish the Jackson Laboratory and Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, now world-class research institutions focusing on genetics and regenerative biology, respectively.Īnnie Sawyer Downs was a mentor to Edward Rand of the Champlain Society and collaborated with him during his plant inventories of Mount Desert Island.Ĭourtesy of the Trustees of Phillips AcademyĮarly in Acadia’s history, the park hosted foundational research in ecology and geology. Rockefeller, and others) envisioned the park and the surrounding area becoming a retreat or field station for science. When Acadia was first established as Sieur de Monts National Monument, the major backers of the park’s creation (George Dorr, Charles William Eliot, John D. Their citizen science (science that involves the participation of people who are not “professional scientists”) largely inspired the protection of Acadia as a national park. In the 1880s, a group of Harvard College students spent summers on Mount Desert Island the Champlain Society did some of the first recorded detailed inventories of plants, birds, fish, geology, and waters of the island. William Stimpson, Addison Verrill, Edward Morse, and Alpheus Hyatt studied the invertebrates of shoreline and seafloor. Geologists, in particular, traveled here to understand past climate changes and the shifting of glaciers and sea level, including Louis Agassiz, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, and Florence Bascom. In the early 1800s, visitors and immigrants from Europe came to the region as part of government surveys and naturalist expeditions. Members of the Champlain Society at camp during one of their summer field sessions on Mount Desert Island.

The Plants of Acadia National Park by Glen H. Mittelhauser