Student Training and Internships

Stakeholder Interviews 

Over the course of this internship, Aeowyn Kendrich from the University of New Hampshire conducted 13 interviews with stakeholders with critical and diverse roles in local communities in New Hampshire and Maine. Each interview was guided by questions identified during the virtual focus group events, but the content varied widely by people’s focus areas and what they chose to focus on. Interviews were conducted and recorded with participant’s permission via Zoom. Recordings were then used to generate transcripts and aggregated and coded using a qualitative data management software Quirkos. Several interconnected themes and categories emerged, including links among community, culture, values, and decision-making as well as connections between education, social landscapes, and communications.  Initial results were presented at the 2022 Fall American Geophysical Union meeting.

Maine-Greenland Collaborations project

 This CoPe project helped support efforts of five University of Southern Maine students (4 graduate, 1 undergraduate) working with three faculty members in association with the University of Southern Maine’s Maine-Greenland Collaborations. Projects addressed one of the key themes of this CoPe project concerning the links between Arctic change coastal New England. 

1.     Vegetation mapping in Kujataa, Greenland, with MA student Izaak Onos building a comprehensive growing season dataset that will provide a detailed understanding of landscape-level changes to vegetation patterns in Kujataa, Greenland

2.     Digital Art and Design, with BFA student Matt Keith producing photographs and a short documentary movie portraying the lived experiences of coastal communities in Maine and Greenland and the impacts of ecological change on these communities

3.     Long Island, Maine Collage Workshop, (https://vimeo.com/662759254 ) where three graduate students (Elizabeth Chalmers, Lisa Luken, Wynne Cushing) helped prepare, conduct, and report on a community workshop in September 2021 on Long Island Maine that used a collage-based community art activity to highlight the values and stories of people living in coastal Maine. Lessons from event are being used to design community art events (collage workshop and “art treks”) in Greenland planned for June 2022.  More details of these projects are described in the Training and Professional Development section of this report.