The Scarborough Marsh, covering 3,100 acres, is the state’s largest contiguous salt marsh. Drew Johnson / The Forecaster
After years of collaboration, the Scarborough Land Trust and the Friends of Scarborough Marsh announced Thursday that they are officially merging.
“One of the great things about the merger is it lets us speak with one voice related to the marsh,” said Andrew Mackie, the land trust’s executive director. At meetings with town officials or state agencies, for example, “it allows us to go in with one clear vision for the marsh.”
The merger comes at a time when the Scarborough Marsh is seeing multiple threats, said Mackie and Steve Pinette, president of the Friends of Scarborough Marsh.
“The marsh is facing a lot of impacts from development and from stormwater discharge, causing invasive plants to grow in the marsh,” Pinette said. Invasive reed grass has overtaken roughly 5% of the marsh.
Sea level rise poses another threat, Mackie said, and the merged group’s focus will be on conserving land around the marsh so it has space to handle more water.
“As sea level rises, those marsh grasses can only take a certain amount of water,” Mackie said. “So the question is, where does that marsh move to as sea level increases?”
Conserving land around the marsh is key because it won’t have room to spread if “you have someone’s home sitting there,” he said.
The land trust’s bigger budget, experienced grant writers and full-time staff members will allow the members of Friends of Scarborough Marsh to have greater impact, Mackie said.
Pinette said his all-volunteer group needed to collaborate with a bigger organization.
“We felt by combining our resources with the land trust, we could do more research, do more outreach, do more land acquisition to foster that conservation effort,” Pinette said.
Pinette and his group’s treasurer, Betsy Barrett, will be on the land trust’s board of directors while other group members will join the land trust’s Scarborough Marsh Committee. The merged organization will now operate under the Scarborough Land Trust name.
A possible merger came up over the years as the two nonprofits joined forces on conservation efforts, including land acquisition along the outskirts of the marsh. As their joint efforts became more frequent, the merger discussions were more seriously considered.
The two groups have shared many of the same donors and volunteers, and they have worked together on educational programs and the merger will bolster those efforts as well, Mackie and Pinette said.
“Follow a Raindrop is a program that we co-developed,” Mackie said. “We start out in western Scarborough, bring kids to a site there, we look at freshwater streams and then bring them to Blue Point Preserve and look at the salt marsh, and then we go to Ferry Beach.”
Pinette also pointed to the program as a key collaboration.
“The idea is to teach young students the importance of a watershed and how precipitation falls on the upland portions of a watershed and how it migrates and is eventually discharged in the marsh,” he said.
Mackie and Pinette both said they hope the public will have a positive response to the announcement.
“Several people have said ‘it’s about time,'” Pinette said of when the organizations announced internally they would be merging. “They wondered why the two organizations haven’t merged before … I think it’s being received well by the donors and supporters, so we’re hoping the rest of the public will feel the same way.”
For more information about the Scarborough Land Trust, go to scarboroughlandtrust.org.
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