ORLAND – An international effort to gather information on the health of the Gulf of Maine and the watersheds that feed it got a local jump-start this week as representatives from a number of organizations and agencies met locally.

The session was the first for what will be the planning committee for a local forum on the area from Blue Hill Bay to Taunton Bay, one of 18 such committees now being established in three states and three Canadian provinces that form the borders of the Gulf of Maine.

The sessions are being held under the auspices of the Global Programme of Action Coalition for the Gulf of Maine, a cross-sector working group trying to reduce risks from land-based activities that affect the Gulf of Maine.

The goal, according to Pam Person, the U.S. co-chairman for GPAC’s joint management committee, is to develop baseline information about the health of the gulf, making use of all the initiatives that are under way. Eventually, information from the 18 local forums will be presented at a State of the Gulf of Maine Summit.

“The idea is to build a combination of information – scientific information and anecdotal information – that will tell us the state of the environment of the Gulf of Maine,” Person said Monday. “We want to do this from the bottom up, by working with the people and organizations that are already doing work here. A lot of stuff is happening all around the gulf. We need to have everyone gathered together.”

Through a series of local committees in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, GPAC hopes to promote a sharing of information and to develop a connection among those six individual areas to the larger Gulf of Maine watershed.

The basis of the “bottom-up” process, Person said, is that local people and local groups generally know more about what is happening in their area, and through their own studies and use of the area can provide current information that can be useful in determining the overall health of the watershed and eventually the gulf.

A forum to review local information will be scheduled for sometime this fall. The State of the Gulf of Maine Summit is set for the fall of 2003.

Representatives from several groups or agencies already involved in studying the local watershed area, which includes most of Hancock County, were included in Monday’s meeting. They included a teacher working with elementary school pupils who regularly monitor the coast in Brooksville, the Union River Water Coalition and the MDI Water Quality Coalition, the Hancock County Planning Commission, the county Soil and Water Conservation District and Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery.

Much of Monday’s meeting centered on what other groups or organizations should be included in the planning committee and in the local forum. Notably missing from the initial list of participants were groups from the area east of Ellsworth. Attendees quickly came up with several suggestions, including Friends of Taunton Bay, Frenchmans Bay Conservancy, Schoodic Futures and the MDI League of Towns.

They also discussed the possibility of including representatives from the business and industry sectors within the county. A list of other potential participants will be developed by the next committee meeting in March.

In a related project, geared toward easing land-based pressures on the marine environment, GPAC recently published a small booklet titled “50 Ways to Save the Gulf of Maine.”

Written by Jon Percy of Nova Scotia, the booklet outlines the current land-based activities that affect the gulf, ranging from the use of fertilizers and the release of sewage to littering and industrial activities that create acid rain, and also provides a list of 50 actions that individuals can take to protect the gulf.