FALMOUTH – Hoping to help landowners protect forest wildlife dependent on small wetlands, Maine Audubon has just released a new guide.
“Forestry Habitat Management Guidelines for Vernal Pool Wildlife” is the first resource of its kind for forest landowners, resource managers and loggers who want to harvest timber without degrading vernal pool habitat.
“Vernal pools may look like lifeless spring puddles, but they’re crucial to a wide range of wildlife,” stated Maine Audubon Conservation Director Sally Stockwell in a press release.
Maine’s vernal pools are typically wetlands of an acre or less that lack permanent inlet or outlet streams and are often dry in summer.
Despite their small size and apparent simplicity, they provide critical breeding habitat for frogs, salamanders, insects and fairy shrimp.
Stockwell said that frogs and salamanders – the building blocks of the forest food web – move significant distances from vernal pools into the surrounding forest, where shade, leaf litter and dead woody material is key to their survival.
As a companion to the “Best Development Practices” 2002 publication ($10), which helps residential and commercial developers minimize disturbance to vernal pools, the new guide provides pragmatic advice on how to identify vernal pools and limit disturbance around them. It also has a section on vernal pool ecology.
Increasingly, vernal pools and their adjacent amphibian habitat overlap with land slated for intense logging or development, Stockwell said, and current federal and state wetland regulations do not adequately protect them.
“It’s very important that businesses, towns and individuals who own and work the land learn how to identify and protect these rich pockets of wildlife habitat,” she added.
The new guide, which sells for $8, is a cooperative publication of Maine Audubon, the University of Maine, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Maine departments of Conservation and Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
To get a copies of either guide, people can contact Becca Wilson at 781-2330, ext. 222, or send a check payable to “Maine Audubon” to Maine Audubon, 20 Gilsland Farm Road, Falmouth, ME 04105.
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