Happy Trails - WINDFM - 92 5 Gainesville 95 5 Ocala windfm.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from windfm.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Jaclyn Lopez, Center for Biological Diversity, (727) 490-9190, jlopez@biologicaldiversity.org
Emily Deanne, National Resources Defense Council, (860) 318-6636, edeanne@nrdc.org
Hike, Rally to Save Everglades’ Big Cypress Set for Saturday
National Preserve Threatened by Oil Drilling
BIG CYPRESS NATIONAL PRESERVE,
Fla. At 9 a.m. on Saturday conservation advocates Betty Osceola and the Rev. Houston Cypress will lead environmental leaders and the media on a socially distanced hike in Big Cypress National Preserve along the route of a proposed oil well pad access road.
A press conference and socially distanced rally will follow the hike. Supporters can follow the event live online.
Hiking the Aucilla Sinks | Geology of the Floridan Aquifer Uncovered
North Floridians are drawn to the Aucilla Sinks because they’re unlike almost anything else in Florida, and a little mysterious. A trail winds past rocky pools and short streams lined with tall walls of limestone. What we’re seeing is bits and pieces of the Aucilla River. The river runs aboveground to the north and to the south of here, but I wonder- what happened to it in the middle? I wanted to know, so I invited geologist Harley Means for a hike.
We don’t associate Florida with large rocks. What Harley revealed to me, though, is that the Aucilla Sinks are in fact uniquely Floridian. It’s the Florida beneath us, exposed.
Everglades National Park
The Everglades ecosystem once stretched across a mosaic of wetlands and subtropical wilderness from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Unfortunately, by the mid-1900s nearly half of the slow-moving “river of grass” had been drained to make way for farms and urban development. The park was established in 1947, after decades of activism, to preserve a treasured 1.5 million acres of the ecosystem.
The Everglades is a complex mix of salt and freshwater wetlands, hardwood hammocks, and pine rocklands that support a wide variety of flora and fauna. The ecosystem functions as a giant water purifier, filtering and cleaning water that drains from farms and impervious surfaces before reaching Florida Bay and the Ten Thousand Islands. The Everglades also contributes to South Florida’s climate resilience, naturally absorbing the impacts of hurricanes and minimizing coastal erosion and flooding.
Maitland rejects $200K federal grant for park renovations orlandosentinel.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from orlandosentinel.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.