Thea Youngs, the James and Joanne Cooney GIS Fellow with the newly incorporated Town of Chebeague Island, has adjusted to the practical jokes of the public works department and the snug office that she shares with the clerks, code enforcement officer, town administrator, harbormaster and visiting children and dogs.

But while adept at technological troubleshooting and manipulating data for her GIS maps, Youngs had a little trouble with the concept of island time and its effect upon heating appliances.

“First I had to arrange a kerosene delivery,” she said, “and then the heater just died. The manufacturer couldn’t do anything since they didn’t install it, so I was a little nervous until I heard about Justin the local `heater-guru.’ But even Justin couldn’t get it to work. And then my landlady wasn’t available for a few days…”

But no problem: “People are so nice here. They’d invite me over to get warm,” Thea said, and she kept active with some vigorous practicing on a new penny whistle, “keeping the rhythm with your feet.”

And one afternoon, Youngs returned home to find a new heater, ordered by the landlady late the previous night, being installed. “It may take a while to get something started but, once it begins, it all happens right away,” Youngs reflects.

Originally from Penacook, New Hampshire, Youngs recently graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a major in geography. She spent a year at the University of London, Royal Holloway, and received a summer Fellowship at the Queen’s University Centre for Data Digitation and Analysis in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

She has employed GIS in a number of contexts. While abroad, she assisted research on changing patterns of infant mortality in 20th century England and Wales, and has also researched population dynamics in France and habitat-type at the Plum Island Long-Term Ecological Research Site in Newburyport, MA.

Youngs is excited to bring this experience to Chebeague. It is an interesting time to be on the island, which incorporated as a new town on July 1, 2007, and Young’s GIS skills and knowledge have been appreciated as the town prepares its first zoning ordinances, taxes and comprehensive plan. Many of her tasks have involved purchasing and installing new equipment to establish GIS as the primary tool to evaluate municipal information. Youngs must also reexamine and convert existing GIS maps and data to reflect Chebeague’s status as an independent town.

This latter task has been particularly interesting to her, as she finds working on GIS in a small town to be very different than examining historical data or attributes of a large-city.

“The scale is so much different. People know so much about individual lots or individual areas and they can correct things. This allows for a lot more critical examination of the data because a little bit of variation — a few numbers off, or a little bit smaller area — make a huge difference on Chebeague as opposed to when you are looking at large city or country-wide data.”

Youngs says that living on Chebeague continually offers either something new for her to learn or a chance to develop her existing interests. Aside from practicing her long-dormant penny whistle, a lack of convenience stores has encouraged baking “experiments” and the congeniality and good stories at Quilting Club have inspired renewed attention to the sweater she began knitting in high school.

But working with the new town of Chebeague Island has provided the most unique glimpse of island life.

“It’s really interesting; a lot to take in. You take the issue of seceding and you think that it is all sorts of big issues…but it’s really the little things — what the clerks have to figure out on a daily basis, and often on the fly, that make it all work.”

— Cyrus Moulton