This August marks the release “The Plants of Baxter State Park,” co-authored with botanist Alison Dibble and six others, which contains the first complete inventory of the park’s 857 types of plants, information gathered over five years. It would be a challenge to make a complete list of all of Mittelhauser’s lists, but in the 30 plus years since Mittelhauser arrived in Maine to attend the College of the Atlantic, he’s inventoried Acadia’s plants in a book called “The Plants of Acadia,” the sedges of Maine (flowering plants different from grasses and rushes) in another book and Isle au Haut’s winter population of nesting Harlequin ducks. But using GPS and a careful grid system as he inventories the plants of this salt marsh, Mittelhauser can send the botanist of the future to an exact location to see just how the natural world has changed as a result of development, climate change or some other factor. From a century ago, those are helpful clues. In his own field work he’s been grateful for the naturalists of the past who used even something as basic as a place name to note where they found a species. “What tidbit can I get in there for them?” he said.
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