As Extension Faculty for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant, Esperanza designs and implements educational programs for high priority areas in Ecosystem Health, specifically in marine environmental monitoring and watershed assessment and management. Specific responsibilities include: providing training and ongoing technical and organizational assistance for coastal groups; developing and delivering marine education programs for students, teachers, and other community members; and developing resources for marine education programs. Her interests also include assisting with the development of educational and monitoring programs for intertidal habitat and climate change.

Esperanza Stancioff
Extension Educator
University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant
377 Manktown Road
Waldoboro, ME 04572
Phone: 207.832.0343 or
1.800.244.2104
Fax: 207.832.0377
Email Esperanza Stancioff

Launched in 2002, the Maine Healthy Beaches program (MHB) was established to ensure that Maine 's saltwater beaches remain safe and clean. The program, involving 20 coastal beach communities, performs standardized monitoring of beach-water quality, notifies the public if health risks are detected, and informs both residents and visitors what to do to avoid water-related illness at the beach.

Due to an increasing number of high bacteria scores at several beach sites in both the 2005 and 2006 swim seasons, the MHB program experienced the most advisories and closures posted on several of the 46 participating beaches. In conjunction with its partnering agencies and organizations, the MHB program conducted several special studies to determine the potential and actual pollution sources affecting swimming areas. Key components of these special studies include: intensive and targeted monitoring, wet-weather sampling, sanitary shoreline/watershed surveys, dye tests, and Acoustic Doppler profiling of water currents.

Esperanza Stancioff is the coordinator and Keri Lindberg is the co-coordinator of the MHB program. For more information on the program, check out the Web site at www.MaineHealthyBeaches.org

Maine Healthy Beaches Program 2006 Report 483 KB

Aquatic Invaders in Maine (AIM): Education, Exploration, and Stewardship

The Maine economy and way of life are intricately linked to our fresh- and saltwater resources. The Aquatic Invaders in Maine (AIM): Education, Exploration, and Stewardship program will use the emerging issue of aquatic invasive species as a vehicle to improve aquatic literacy and to promote environmental stewardship. This will be accomplished through an education program for 12 Maine middle schools on aquatic invasive species and related biodiversity concepts, introducing an experiential field component and Vital Signs technology, which was developed by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. This program will augment science education in middle schools by integrating aquatic invasive species and biodiversity into middle school curricula, and by empowering students to collect valuable and useful scientific data. The Vital Signs technology will engage and teach Maine students about our aquatic environments by involving them directly in relevant scientific research. The AIM program will demonstrate to middle school teachers, students, and their communities the need for collecting meaningful aquatic invasive data and the importance of their role in preserving aquatic biodiversity, thus promoting environmental awareness and stewardship.

Partners working with University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Maine Sea Grant in the AIM program include the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, University of Maine Climate Change Institute, and Maine Shore Stewards volunteers.

Based on the online database, a public interface to the Maine Healthy Beaches Web site has been created for the public. A series of Web pages allows the public to access current beach conditions, information on specific beaches in the program, monitoring sites, and bacteria results. Other parameters will be added this year, including temperature, salinity, and tidal stage per sample site and date. http://www.mainecoastdata.org/public/

Facilitation