Join SCAS For Our January Meeting!

Join Space Coast Audubon Society on the evening of January 18, at 7:30 when we welcome Tom Hoctor from the University of Florida Center for Landscape Conservation Planning and the Conservation Trust for Florida. Tom will give us a presentation about the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

The Florida Ecological Greenways Network (FEGN) is a part of the Florida Greenways Program and identifies the opportunities to protect functionally connected landscapes of conservation significance across the state, with the highest FEGN priorities named Critical Linkages.  The Florida Wildlife Corridor is an outreach and education campaign to promote this vision of an ecologically-connected network of public and private conservation lands, which was conceived by Carlton Ward from the Legacy Institute for Nature and Culture and developed in collaboration with Tom Hoctor from the University of Florida Center for Landscape Conservation Planning and the Conservation Trust for Florida. 

In 2012, after two years in planning, the project debuted in the form of a 1000-mile, 100 day expedition from Florida Bay in Everglades National Park up the peninsula to Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in southern Georgia. The trek was carried out by four Florida-based conservationists: photojournalist Carlton Ward, Jr., biologist Joe Guthrie, nature filmmaker Elam Stoltzus, and conservationist Mallory Lykes Dimmitt.   Their route mimicked the path a wide-ranging animal like a panther or a bear might use to move through the landscape, by sticking to large natural and rural landscapes and utilizing existing highway wildlife crossings or underpasses.  The expedition touched virtually all of the large publicly-owned conservation landmarks on the Florida peninsula, such as Everglades National Park, the Big Cypress National Preserve, Ocala National Forest, and Osceola National Forest. 

But a large proportion of the south-central Florida peninsula is held by private landowners, and their participation in conservation programs is vital to protecting focal species habitat and water quality and quantity in the upper reaches of the Everglades and St. Johns River watersheds.  The Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition visited and highlighted these properties, seeking to advance the conversation between the agricultural interests and the conservation community.  There is an urgent need to build support for funding voluntary programs that can help compensate landowners for putting their land into conservation including Florida Forever, which is Florida’s premier conservation land acquisition program that has been lagging in the last several years due to severe budget cuts. 

To help do this the group invited politicians, policy makers, and stakeholders to hike or paddle with them.  The group used a variety of outreach tools, like social media, weekly videos and radio reports from the field, and blogs to communicate with the audience their trek attracted.  A film about the expedition by Elam Stoltzfus will air on PBS in April 2013 in Florida and in June 2013 nationally, and the education and outreach effort will continue through publications, presentations, and social media. 

For more information, go to http://www.floridawildlifecorridor.org/.