Changing Acadia: Resist, Accept or Direct — Managing the Great Meadow Wetland

Along the trails of Acadia National Park, large cedar tripods carry displays explaining how the park is managing a fast-changing landscape. This page presents the displays at the Great Meadow wetland — for visitors who can't see or reach them, and for anyone who may never visit in person. (A companion set stands on the summit of Cadillac Mountain.)

NPS Photo by Jay Elhard.

Acadia is changing fast

The landscape has always changed, but the pace has quickened and the future is less certain. With partners Friends of Acadia and Schoodic Institute, the park is working to keep Acadia beautiful and healthy whatever comes.

NPS Photo by Jay Elhard.

Using the future as a guide

For nearly a century, park managers looked to the past to decide how to preserve and restore landscapes. Climate change is now too fast and intense for that to be possible — or even desirable. So each decision now weighs three options:

NPS Photo by Jay Elhard.

Tomorrow's forest. Today's most common trees — spruce, fir, cedar and paper birch — are cold-adapted and not expected to thrive as it warms. The forest will likely shift toward maple, oak and hickory: more bare branches in winter, more fresh green each spring, and different birds and insects. The shift may not be smooth, because the climate is changing faster than trees can migrate, and much stands in their way. Some changes will be gradual, some sudden; some predictable, some surprises.

The Great Meadow

The Great Meadow, one of Acadia's largest wetlands, is lovelier than it is healthy. Past logging, road building and introduced plants have disrupted the water's flow from the Tarn through the meadow toward Cromwell Harbor, leaving it with less of the function and diversity of a healthy wetland. Warmer temperatures and stronger, more frequent storms now amplify that old damage — in winter 2023 the Jesup Path boardwalk lay flooded and frozen.

With its partners, the park is:

• continuing to stop invasive plants from spreading;
• enlarging a culvert under the Park Loop Road;
• removing other obstructions so water flows better and floods less.

The goal: a wetland with more native plants and wildlife, better water flow and more resilience to extreme weather.

Watching it recover. Schoodic Institute scientists, students and volunteers are monitoring the meadow; hundreds of people have recorded more than 600 species of plants, animals and fungi there. The data guide management and show how the wetland responds to climate change.

You can help by logging plants and wildlife you see on iNaturalist and eBird — see go.nps.gov/AcadiaData.

About the displays

Researchers and communicators from the park, Schoodic Institute and Friends of Acadia began the project in early 2022.

• Nine cedar tripods in all: six carrying 18 original panels, each 19 × 32 inches — three tripods at each site — and three more with nine duplicate panels.
• The cedar was scrap donated by a local log yard; the design follows smaller tripods the trail crew builds for signs above treeline, where winds are fierce.
• Authors: Catherine Schmitt, Jesse Wheeler, Emma Lanning, Stephanie Ley, Brian Henkel, Abe Miller-Rushing and Tim Watkins; Jay Elhard was project manager, designer and carpenter.

Sources

Based on "Changing Acadia: Wetlands," Acadia National Park, National Park Service, prepared with Schoodic Institute and Friends of Acadia; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.