Navigating Acadia National Park during the busy season can be a challenge. Mountainous terrain makes cell signals spotty and weather highly variable from one part of the park to another. Visitors often have no way of knowing that a parking lot is full, rain clouds have moved in, or traffic has backed up on the Park Loop Road until they get there.
It’s not much easier for park managers. Numerous road and trail access points make it hard to track people coming to and from the park, and information on traffic and environmental conditions is often delayed until staff can get on site and download data.
Once on the trails, especially on the open, subalpine terrain of mountain summits, visitors can stray from designated paths, inadvertently trampling sensitive vegetation. The resulting erosion is the focus of a multi-year effort to restore degraded summit areas by park managers, working closely with Friends of Acadia and Schoodic Institute.
The partners have received a new $1.5 million grant from the National Park Foundation, one of 18 awards totaling more than $10 million to support 21 national parks, to deploy sensors, predictive analytics, and communication tools designed to provide visitors and park managers real-time information about congestion and wait times along key corridors and weather conditions on popular mountain summits.
In the first year, funds will support hiring of specialists in data visualization and sensor technology, and upgrading connectivity and traffic monitoring at Sand Beach and Jordan Pond. The partners aim to combine these new sources of information with data gathered by Friends of Acadia’s Recreation Technician team to provide up-to-the-minute conditions at entrance stations and parking areas, with personal privacy protections in place. Visitors would then be able to adjust when and where and how they experience the park, for example by choosing to take the free Island Explorer shuttle bus, selecting a different trailhead, or waiting until rain clouds have cleared from mountain summits.
Over the next two years, permitted drone flights over Sargent Mountain will obtain high-resolution imagery of vegetation and erosion, which will then be ground-truthed to create maps of baseline conditions and potential restoration areas. A new weather station on Sargent Mountain will complement data from the existing station on Cadillac Mountain. Details remain to be finalized, but the research team, which includes Schoodic Institute Climate Adaptation Scientist Chris Nadeau, also expects to install remote cameras and hydrology sensors to provide real-time data on wildlife and water flows in the Great Meadow.
For park managers, knowing more about how people and wildlife move through and around the park as well as changing weather, runoff, and potential flooding will help them protect resources, prioritize locations for restoration, and provide guidance to visitors.
The effort, really a series of related projects, represents a pilot and exact outcomes are undetermined. Such is the nature of innovation.
