February 2024

The Ybor City Campus at Hillsborough Community College is running a sustainability class with a difference, underlining the point which we’ve highlighted many times in the H2O Zone – that if you want to understand sustainability, nothing beats getting face to face and hands on with the natural world. In this case that means a trip up to the roof of the Student Services Building – one of the tallest in Ybor – to interact with no less than 25 bee hives. Both students and members of the general public can don the requisite safety gear and interact with the bees, learning about how they benefit the environment, seeing them taken from the hives and even getting the chance to taste some of the delicious fresh honey being produced. Throw in the fantastic views as far as downtown Tampa and it makes for a trip which people are keen to share on their social media feeds and repeat as soon as possible.

You may well have heard the old saying about trees – ‘The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is today’. It’s an ethos which the city of Boca Raton seems to have taken to heart, as it recently celebrated its  44^th consecutive year as an official Tree City USA and the 5^th Growth Award from the National Arbor Day Foundation. The Foundation is a body which promotes the benefits of having trees in urban environments, benefits which go beyond the undoubted aesthetic appeal to encompass cooler temperatures, healthier residents, higher property values and cleaner air, not to mention the protection and sustainance trees provide for wildlife.

The Tree City USA program has been running since 1976 and provides communities with a framework for maintaining and increasing their tree cover. Recognition as a Tree City means that Boca Raton has a current tree board or department, a tree care ordinance, a community forestry program and an annual Arbor Day proclamation. The dedication to trees (Boca Raton was the first US city to have a tree protection ordinance in place) goes hand in hand with projects such as the restoration of Lake Wyman and the local beach dunes, and if you want to find out more you can visit the Boca Raton Tree Canopy web page.

Many of the stories we highlight in the H2O Zone cover large scale initiatives aimed at tackling issues around sustainability, and in particular, water conservation. Despite this, the lesson to be learned from almost every initiative is that individual people taking positive action can help to make a difference. One great example of this was provided this month by the example of Marisa Carrozzo, a Senior Coastal and Wildlife Program Manager in NPCA’s Sun Coast Region, who received the 2024 Conservationist Award at the 39th Annual Everglades Coalition Conference. The reward, given by an organization which has been safeguarding national parks since 2019, was presented in recognition of the work carried out by Marisa over the past 13 years. In that time she has worked to protect wildlife and public waterways from Big Cypress National Preserve to Biscayne National Park to Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and beyond. The initiatives she has championed include the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Restoration Blueprint, which was set up to protect the United States' only coral reef from threats posed by a changing climate and pollution.

The H2O Zone has highlighted stories covering the rising sea levels around Florida many times, and one thing we like to do is celebrate the work of individuals who are determined to make a difference in the face of what can sometimes feel like an implacable force of nature.

One such individual is Tom Ries, a nationally respected ecologist who has spent more than 40 years working to restore wetlands and coastal communities in the Southeast of Florida, including the creation of more than 50 living shorelines in the Tampa Bay region. These shorelines replace failing sea walls unable to cope with rising seas with an assortment of native plants which not only make the shoreline look more beautiful, but are also far better at coping with the changes being triggered by climate change. In addition to rewilding, Tom works to create Public Private Partnerships which invest in the development and restoration of natural springs. As Tom says – “The birds don’t care who owns the property”.

Here at Hoover we spend our lives working on irrigation systems which are capable of coping with the unique challenges of the Florida climate. These challenges include not only the extreme and unpredictable nature of the weather (exacerbated by climate change) but also invasive pests and disease, and technological innovation can play a huge role in providing irrigation which is responsive, flexible and fit for purpose. This particular story looks at the challenges facing citrus farmers in Florida and the use of automation in agriculture to meet those challenges. All too often, people are presented with a binary choice between technology and sustainability, whereas the truth – as this story illustrates – is that technology can often be harnessed to bolster sustainability. In this case that includes the likes of high resolution camera systems to monitor crop development in real time and AI tools to monitor and evaluate soil samples and control smart irrigation systems. As well as improving the efficiency or irrigation systems, technology of this kind can help to cut costs for anyone tasked with maintaining the Florida landscape.

We like to emphasize positive news stories in the H2O Zone, often focusing on the things which individuals can do to help promote environmental awareness in Florida and beyond. We still think it’s important, however, to highlight those cases in which the negative impact of aspects such as rising sea temperatures are all too clear, and the condition of the coral reef off the coast of Florida is a clear example. This story looks at monitoring of the coral reefs off the Florida Keys and the degree to which they are recovering from record high sea temperatures last summer. During the summer, the temperature of the sea water was much higher than the seasonal norm and, in one instance, actually topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8C) in Manatee Bay. A team of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) surveyed 64 locations and found that only 22% of one particular species was still alive and that another was present at only three of the sites.

One of the issues facing Floridians as they face up to the growing risk of increasingly extreme weather events is an understanding of the resilience of the existing infrastructure. This article looks at the annual Gulf of Mexico Alliance Conference in Tampa, and highlights the work on resiliency which is being carried out at the University of South Florida. This work is centered upon the establishment of the Florida Flood Hub at the USF College of Marine Science in St. Petersburg. The aim of the hub is to make it easier to identify the areas, roads and buildings which are the most vulnerable to flooding across the state, with the ultimate target being an assessment of pretty much every single item of infrastructure and each critical asset within the state of Florida. The picture of flood risk created by a hub of this kind will enable decisions on dealing with flood risks to be made in a clear and transparent manner, at the same time as lessening the burden currently being carried by local government.

Articles highlighted in the H2O Zone often advocate the use of ‘living shorelines’ as a means of protecting the coast of Florida from extreme weather events. This particular article goes one stage further than simply recommending the creation of living shorelines and looks at a practical demonstration of how effective living shorelines actually are. Living shorelines of this kind involve the planting of specific types of vegetation and the placing of structures designed to attract oysters and other sea life.

The plants and structures hold soil and sand in place and effectively absorb the impact of incoming waves. Shorelines of this kind were planted on Cedar Key in the years after Hurricane Hermine hit in 2016, and Hurricane Idalia represented a test of the effectiveness of this technique. When it hit, the hurricane was the strongest to make landfall in this part of Florida since 1950, and when it moved on after four hours the living shorelines were still intact. In addition to this, data collected showed that the shorelines reduced the pressure of incoming waves by as much as 15-20%, and coped with much higher water levels than they had initially been designed to deal with. Not only did the living shorelines cope with the hurricane more effectively than traditional ‘armored shorelines’, but any areas which were damaged rebounded quickly, something which traditional man-made sea defense structures can’t do.