Side story: Why I am interested in Agi Sci...

I was exposed to the outdoors as a very young child. My grandfather made simple bird feeders out of pvc pipes and scrap wood and let me help 'feed' the birds and my uncle thought it was ever so funny that the 'Easter Bunny' would drop off baby chicks and bunnies each Spring. My great-grandparents had a Christmas tree farm in Georgia where we would go and pick out a tree during the holidays and my father started bringing me to 'hunt-camp' when I was about eight. I learned the value of clean water and how hard it was to hunt and fish for dinner. I'm sure he would have been able to hunt a lot better had iPods been invented back then as I might have stopped talking long enough for a deer to get anywhere close to us!

Environmental Science: Habitat Park; SPC Seminole

Observations:

The Habitat Park seemed to slide back and forth between Upland and Wetland environments, sometimes within just a few feet of each other. While pretty, the environment felt forced, and the plants were not cohesive within the areas they inhabited. The ponds all seemed to want to natively be upland environments with drier soil and more trees like oak and laurel than the smaller shrubs and cattails, lilies, and grasses that we saw. At the end of the trip, after taking soil samples we came across a small purple/pink flower from the mint plant. This is commonly referred to as Hitchhiker’s plant or Florida Betony. Its scientific name is Stachys floridana.

Environmental Science: Upper Tampa Bay Park

Summary: 

Our trip began by meeting at the Upper Tampa Bay Park Nature Center located at 8001 Double Branch Rd., Tampa, FL 33615. The north end of the park had undergone a partial prescribed burn two days prior. Their goal was to clear out some of the undergrowth of saw palmetto so the natural wildflowers and grasses could regrow in the pine flatwoods.

The area we walked through was along the coastal boardwalk through the mangrove forests and up into the salt barren. The mangroves, which included the ovoid leafed white mangrove (a transitional plant), the taller, feather leafed black mangrove (salt tolerant), and the twisted root system of the red mangrove (will live directly in the salt water) lined the wooden boardwalk and hugged the coast line.

Environmental Science: Iraqi Marshlands

Iraqi Marshlands

                Between Amarah and Basrah along the South-Eastern border of Iraq and Iran, in what was once the heart of the Mesopotamian cultures of Uruk and Ur (Ancient Mesopotamia, 2006), a battle over water and a way a life gets a little reprieve. The once lush marsh lands called the Ahwar, “are unique, [being] as [they are] one of the world’s largest inland delta systems, [surviving] in an extremely hot and arid environment” (Unesco, 2016). Home to the Madaan, or Marsh Arabs, for thousands of years (Wikipedia, 2016) the Madaan formed homes within the marsh in reed houses and typically fell into one of three economic patterns: those that raised buffalo and sold the milk for drinking and to make cheese, those that spear fished, and those that farmed rice or harvested dates and other wild foods (Ali, 2003). Traditionally subsistence farmers, since the 1970s Saddam Hussein systematically moved to destroy their way of life.

Environmental Science: BLUE OCEAN Festival

              

               I attended the BLUE OCEAN Festival in St. Petersburg on Sunday, November 13. The presentations I saw was the release of the movies Before the Flood with Leonardo DiCaprio, The Forgotten Coast with Carlton Ward Jr., Tampa Bay Water Story with professors from USF, and a Q&A session with Carlton Ward Jr., Mallory Dimmit, Joe Guthrie, and Dr. Silvia Earle on how citizen science can make a difference.

Environmental Science: “Isolated” Wetlands

“Isolated” Wetlands

The Clean Water Act was initially enacted in 1972 as an effort to control water pollution. For the purpose of this article the CWA refers to waters that are navigable. These waters include territorial seas and ‘wetlands’ (Leibowitz & Nadeau, 2003). Section 404 of the CWA establishes a program to “protect the nation’s waters by requiring a permit for the discharge of dredged or fill material into waters of the United States, including wetlands” (Leibowitz & Nadeau, 2003). The focus of the court case mentioned, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 531 U.S. 159 (2001) (SWANCC), was to determine if The Migratory Bird Rule addressed whether to include isolated waters as waters of the U.S. “The Court held that the CWA is not intended to protect isolated, intrastate, non-navigable waters based solely on their use by migratory birds, but did not decide whether Congress had the authority to regulate such waters” (Leibowitz & Nadeau, 2003).

Environmental Science: Brooker Creek Preserve Report

Narrative

Starting from the parking lot we began the trail in an upland environment. Trees observed were persimmon (most suffering from a disease which curls and browns the leaves), oak, dogfennel, and beautyberry bush. Muscadine grape vines were proliferate. Animals observed upon entering and leaving the park’s Pine Flatwoods included a large (~1’x8”) gopher tortoise and a red shoulder hawk. The Pine Flatwoods included various grasses and wildflowers, slash and longleaf pine and saw palmetto. Once we entered the trail and proceeded into the preserve, we very quickly transitioned to wetlands. The soil became saturated within a dozen feet of the trail entrance and dry upland plants such as saw palmetto, sumac, bidens flower, rag weed, wax myrtle, and wheely grass gave way to transition plants like cinnamon fern, sawgrass, button bush, and Red Maple.

Environmental Science: Florida Wetlands Permit Fiasco

Florida Wetlands Permit Fiasco

2008 saw the beginning of a six year battle over a Florida Pine Plantation, although no one knew it at the time. The Highlands Ranch Bank, created under the auspices of the Carlyle Group and Hassan & Lear Acquisitions, sought 688 credits from the St. Johns River Water Management District to offset dry land being turned back into wetlands. These credits could then be sold off to other consumers who need to fill in a patch of land for reasons such as construction or pasturage (Pittman, Controversial wetlands permit wins approval, 2012).

Environmental Science: Global Owl Project

           I attended a training on how to construct artificial nestingboxes for Burrowing Owls. The training was led by David Johnson from the Global Owl Project. The first artificial nesting boxes (1977) were just that, plywood boxes with tunnels that had a 90 degree angle in them. They worked, but had issues with water seepage, inability to maneuver easily and no way to see if they worked. Mr. Johnson’s design uses flexible 6” drain line (10’ long), half of a 55 gallon barrel, hardware mesh (3’x4’), a tube of liquid nails, and two Letica 3 ½ gallon buckets. Since the liquid nails needs to be spread on so thick, he recommends leaving it to dry for three to four days. These nests should last 10 years and as long as you do not clean them out, the owls should return again and again.

Environmental Science: ELAPP

I attended a lecture by Ross Dickerson who is with the Hillsborough County Environmental Lands Management. His presentation was on the Jan. K. Platt Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program. The program covers almost 62, 000 acres and is the largest preservation program funded by local government in the state. ELAPP’s purpose is to provide the process and funding for identifying, acquiring, preserving and protecting endangered, environmentally-sensitive and significant lands in Hillsborough.

Environmental Science: Tsunamis and Mangroves

December 2, 2004. It’s shortly before 8am in Sumatra, Indonesia and the ground shifts dangerously. A devastating 9.15 earthquake rips through the Indian Ocean 150km away causing the seabed to rise by several meters. Thirty kilometers of water rise as tsunamis to pound mercilessly across coastlines in thirteen countries in a series of waves as high as ten meters in some areas. Over 230,000 people die and millions are left without homes and livestock; most are found in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India (Environmental Justice Foundation, 2006, p. 3).

Environmental Science: Water Wars

Pacifica, California overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

            Hearing the words ‘shadow program’ one might think of secret governments or mutated super men, but in California and twenty-three other states, the term applies to a water usage program that’s much scarier. Back in the 1980s the EPA started “an underground disposal program that allows toxic substances to be disposed of in nearly 700,000 waste wells across the country” (Lustgarten, 2016). These ‘aquifer exemptions’ are nearly impossible to track down. Even the EPA when pressed for more information, “admitted that…incomplete location coordinates for a majority of the exemptions… was all the information the agency had” (Lustgarten, 2016). Losing a few hundred thousand wells might be terrifying in itself, but what’s in those wells should really alarm you. According to Lustgarten,

Agricultural Sciences: Fun Pictures

Sometimes, you just need a bit of laughter or aww moments to get through learning about digestive tracks and ringworm. So here's some random Agricultural Science pictures I had floating around on the computer. Some are from feed stores and some from the various farm visits I've taken.

Floating aquaculture tanks. Each one had fish living in the wooden tanks.

Environmental Science: Paul Greenberg: The four fish we're overeating -- and what to eat instead

Discussion Forum and Opinion on video:

Paul Greenberg: The four fish we're overeating -- and what to eat instead

Summary:

He discusses how we have moved from eating a multitude of animal species to only a few (four in fishing: salmon, cod, tuna, and shrimp). This trend has happened predominantly in the last 50 years. He also mentions how “we are currently taking between 80 and 90 million metric tons” (Greenberg, 2015) out of the sea every year and that with the advent of fish farming and aquaculture we are taking the equivalent of two of the human weight of China out of the seas every year.

Environmental Science: Invasive Species

Invasive species are pests too, but most people don’t think about our waterways when they talk pests and pesticides.

Environmental Science: Renewables in the World Scheme

Modern Windfarm in Northern California

Renewables in the World Scheme

In gardening, they say you need to put the right plant in the right place. I think we are going to have to do the same thing with renewable energy. Not every country has acres to lay down solar panels or waves to collect their energy and so we will need to be flexible and adaptive to our environment. I think the biggest problem will not be the technology, but the politics. If we can get rid of the borders between countries and figure out how to transport energy from one section of the world to another, than we can be successful.

Welcome

Welcome. I am an Agricultural and Environmental Sciences student taking way too many courses at way too many universities. LOL To keep things straight in my head, and maybe help a fellow student or two, I'm going to post some of my discussion posts, essays, and observations here. I hope they help.