While Maine already measures the green carbon storage capacity of its forests, it is one of the first states to consider the potential seaweed has to store carbon when it breaks apart and falls to the ocean floor.
Penelope Overton
Staff Writer
Penny Overton is excited to be the Portland Press Herald’s first climate reporter. Since joining the paper in 2016, she has written about Maine’s lobster and cannabis industries, covered state politics and spent a fellowship year exploring the impact of climate change on the lobster fishery with the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team. Before moving to Maine, she has covered politics, environment, casino gambling and tribal issues in Florida, Connecticut, and Arizona. Her favorite assignments allow her to introduce readers to unusual people, cultures, or subjects. When off the clock, Penny is usually getting lost in a new book at a local coffeehouse, watching foreign crime shows or planning her family’s next adventure.
Effort to save right whales gets $82 million federal grant
Biden administration officials say the investment in new and emerging technologies represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to protect the species.
Maine gets $1 million in grants to create new hiking trails
The projects receiving funding include new trail networks in Windham and New Gloucester.
Colby College professor studying how wildfire smoke fuels climate change
Assistant chemistry professor Greg Drozd says it’s clear there is a feedback loop – climate change leading to more wildfires and wildfires leading to more warming – and is trying to determine the magnitude of the effect.
Erosion on Chebeague Island seen as warning to other coastal communities
Multiple sites are being monitored along Maine’s southern coast, but an intertidal nature preserve on Chebeague Island has changed most of all.
Pro-wind power groups urge Mills to give tribes a place at the table
Environmental and labor officials ask the administration to do more to include the Wabanaki tribes of Maine in offshore wind talks.
Housing, cost of living top of mind for Mainers in UNH poll
Hot-button issues like abortion and gun control have taken a back seat to the economic concerns that affect respondents’ lives on a daily basis.
Grants for Kennebago preservation project on hold over lack of public access
The Rangeley Heritage Land Trust will have two years to secure deeded public access or it will lose $1.7 million to protect thousands of acres along the Kennebago River.
Massive algae bloom in Gulf of Maine mystifies, worries scientists
Researchers say this kind of algae does not produce harmful toxins, but they worry its eventual die-off could lead to low oxygen levels that have preceded large fish and shellfish kills in other areas.
Research at Baxter seeks to identify plants that will adapt to global warming
Scientists say sediment taken from below Chimney Pond, and other Alpine lakes in the Northeast, will yield a fossil record of the plants – those that have died out and those that have survived – since the last ice age.