Shoreland areas – those places adjacent to wetlands, streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes – are incredibly important for fish, wildlife, and water quality. We know that around 85% of vertebrate wildlife in Maine use shoreland areas some time during the year for hiding, nesting, denning, feeding, and traveling, and that a dense cover of herbs, shrubs, and trees within the shoreland area reduces pollution, erosion and sedimentation into our waters and provides high quality habitat. Fortunately, Maine laws recognize the value of these shoreland areas and have a number of protections in place to help maintain good water quality and healthy habitat. However, the rules governing what can and cannot be done within the shoreland area varies from town to town and differ considerably between organized and unorganized towns.
To help, the state worked between 1999 and 2005 to develop statewide standards. According to the Maine Forest Service, the goal of the standards is to “reduce duplication of rules & confusion, make it easier to plan harvests and comply with rules, and protect water quality in Maine’s lakes, ponds, streams, and nonforested wetlands. The rules take effect in organized towns that adopt them, but would also apply to unorganized towns one full year after a “critical mass” of 252 towns has adopted them. The Maine Forest Service announced that the critical mass had been reached by May of 2024, and the new standards will apply to unorganized towns beginning in Jan. 2026.
This is good news, as the new rules will improve consistency across the state. In particular, several important standards that apply in most organized towns, but not in the unorganized towns of northern and Downeast Maine, will ensure better shade over our precious trout and salmon streams, require fish passage on all new and some temporary crossings, and require a 250′ buffer around nonforested (e.g. scrub-shrub and emergent) wetlands larger than 10 acres.
This update will happen automatically in January 2026, but there is one hitch. First, the Maine Legislature must approve revisions to current rules governing shoreland harvesting in the unorganized towns to remove redundancy with the new statewide standards. This is where you come in! These changes will come up during the 2025 legislative session, and Maine Audubon will be actively supporting them. We hope you will join us!
To learn more about these changes, you can register to tune into a live webinar by the Maine Forest Service this Wednesday, August 7, at 9 am with this link, or you can visit the MFS webpage here.
