Current News Items (within the last 30 days)
5/15/2012
Volunteers Helping Re-establish Native Plants at Circle B Bar Reserve
LAKELAND -- If you drove into Circle B Bar Reserve today, you'd see a plant you've never seen there.
It is saw palmetto, one of the most common, widespread native plants in Florida.
But whatever saw palmettos were originally growing on this 1,267-acre former ranch were cleared decades ago to make way for cattle grazing.
Now they're back and eventually will be joined by others.
Volunteers worked Wednesday morning to plant 50 saw palmettos and 50 longleaf pine trees along the winding entrance road. Then they mulched the area with pine straw to suppress weeds.
The plantings followed work earlier this year to mow and herbicide thick stands of exotic plants that had overrun the traffic islands and roadsides leading to Polk's Nature Discovery Center.
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Read this story from The Ledger on TimeoutPolk.com
Learn More about Circle B Bar Reserve
5/15/2012
South Florida Cuts Water Use by 20 Percent
By CURTIS MORGAN
South Florida has suffered through some dreary declines of late — home values, paychecks and the Miami Dolphins, for instance. But in the case of the public thirst for one precious commodity — fresh water — the decline has actually turned into a major money-saving plus.
The 53 water utilities serving Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties pumped about 83 million fewer gallons a day in 2010 than they did in 2000 — despite a population that grew by some 600,000 over the decade — according to a new draft analysis produced by the South Florida Water Management District.
Do the math and it adds up to South Floridians using about 20 percent less water each day for drinking, bathing and sprinkling yards per person than they did a decade ago. That’s about 30 billion gallons over the course of a year, enough unused water to fill 45,900 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
It’s an unexpected but entirely welcome drop-off in public demand in a region that only a decade ago was worried about taps running dry in relentlessly sprawling suburbs.
“It’s not a surprise that it went down,’’ said Mark Elsner, administrator of water supply development for the water management district. “It’s a surprise it went down so much.’’
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Read the full story in the Miami Herald online
5/14/2012
SJRWMD Lake Level Management Meeting May 31
The St. Johns River Water Management District (SJRWMD) will hold a public meeting on May 31 at 6 p.m. to discuss potential water level management options for the Harris Chain of Lakes for the upcoming year. The system includes lakes Apopka, Dora, Harris, Eustis, Yale, Little Lake Harris (the “Super pond”), Griffin and three water control structures — Apopka-Beauclair, Burrell and Moss Bluff locks and dams. Public input on the proposed management options will be welcomed at the meeting. Following the meeting, the District’s Governing Board will consider low-flow discharges and lake regulation schedules for the next year at a June 12 public meeting in Palatka.
The meeting also will include an update on the schedule and process for developing minimum flows and levels. The meeting will be held at the Paul P. Williams Fine Arts Center, Lake Sumter Community College, Leesburg Campus, 9501 U.S. Highway 441, Leesburg, FL 34788.
"Interim Lake Level Analysis" presentation given by SJRWMD to Harris Chain of Lakes Council on May 4th, 2012
For more information visit this link
5/4/2012
FDEP Schedules Hearings on Water Quality "Human Health Criteria"
As part of its "triennial review" of Florida water quality, required by the Federal Clean Water Act, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is conducting a series of three public hearings later this month in West Palm Beach (May 15), Orlando (May 16) and Tallahassee (May 17). Two topics will be considered, dissolved oxygen criteria and "human health criteria" -- i.e., people's exposure to chemicals through drinking water and fish consumption.
The FDEP says that the original dissolved oxygen criteria were based on outdated, nationwide studies, and that the Department has more recent Florida-specific research that will improve its "ability to make accurate environmental decisions and reduce the number of cases where state waters are incorrectly assessed."
Factors in the analysis used to calculate the chemical exposure criteria are the estimated fish consumption rate, consumer body weights, and drinking water consumption rates.
Public comments will be accepted at the meetings, as well as via mail and email. A second set of public workshops will be conducted in July, and the new standards are expected to be adopted in September.
Related article in The Florida Current
Public meeting details including agendas and triennial review fact sheet
5/2/2012
Impact-Based Stormwater Fee Structure Encourages Low-Impact Solutions, Funds Infrastructure
By Tom Arrandale, correspondent for Governing
Any municipal utility expects customers to howl whenever water and sewer rates go up. But Philadelphia businesses have been grumbling for two years about their rates. That's because some monthly bills have climbed thousands of dollars to take into account all the property covered by rooftops, parking lots and other impermeable pavement. Those hardened surfaces shed rain as fast as it falls to the ground, and Philadelphia's redesigned stormwater fees target the properties that contribute most of the pollutant-laced water that flows straight to the city's 79,000 storm drains.
The Philadelphia Water Department, however, is willing to cut commercial customers a lucrative break. In fact, the city will forgive the entire bill if owners build artificial wetlands, plant trees, install rain barrels, cultivate rooftop gardens, lay down permeable pavement or add other water-absorbing features that restore the landscape's natural capacity to absorb summertime cloudbursts and soak up winter snowmelt.
Philadelphia is committed to refurbishing 9,500 acres of paved lands as part of a $2 billion plan for complying with federal orders to fix combined drainage and sewage systems that wash raw sewage and contaminant-laced runoff into the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. For four decades, the city funded its stormwater sewers with monthly fees based on how much municipal drinking water a home or business consumed. But in 2010, the water agency deployed GIS imaging to determine how much of a parcel had been paved over by impervious structures. Two years from now, Philadelphia will finish phasing in fees that require landowners whose properties shed the most stormwater to pick up an even bigger share of the tab.
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Click here to read more of "The Price of Greening Stormwater" in Governing.com
Learn more about Philadelphia's stormwater plan on PhillyWatersheds.org
5/1/2012
UF Journalism Students Explore the "State of Water"
A project of students enrolled at the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, "State of Water" is a new multimedia reporting project that aims to explain the often-complicated subject of water conservation and management in the state of Florida. Twenty "storytellers," guided by three advisers, will tell the stories of our water resources, and how people, politics, ecosystems, and history affect the way we as individuals and as a society relate to water. The project is described as "an experiment in student journalistic storytelling."
Watch the "State of Water" promotional video
Explore the StateofWater.org blog
4/30/2012
New “Spatial Library” Puts Documents (and More) on the Map!
As part of work performed for New College of Florida’s Coastal Watersheds project, the Water Atlas team is working on several enhancements. One of these is the geospatial mapping of items in the Digital Library. Accommodation was also added for new types of library items, including videos, case studies, and contact information for people. New forms were created to facilitate the submission of library items by Water Atlas users, including an interactive tool to help in specifying a location for new library items.
A link to the Spatial Library currently appears in the menu bar on the Sarasota County Water Atlas and the Hillsborough County & City of Tampa Atlas, and will be added for other Water Atlases soon. The Spatial Library can be used to locate library items in any Water Atlas, as the library database is shared and all its entries for lakes, bays, ponds, etc. have been geocoded.
Use the link below to access the Spatial Library, and let us know what you think!
—The Water Atlas Team.
Try the Water Atlas Spatial Library
4/30/2012
Alliance for Water Efficiency Gives Florida a C+ Grade
The Alliance for Water Efficiency and the Environmental Law Institute have released a draft of the report entitled, "The Water Efficiency and Conservation State Scorecard: An Assessment of Laws and Policies." This research effort, funded in part by a grant from the Turner Foundation, identified state level water efficiency and conservation policies and laws throughout the 50 states via a 20-question survey. Water efficiency and conservation laws and policies encompassed in the survey included plumbing fixture standards, water conservation requirements related to water rights, water loss control rules, conservation planning and program implementation, volumetric billing for water, funding sources for water efficiency and conservation programs, and technical assistance and other informational resources.
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Click here for more information and to read the full study
4/27/2012
Water Quality Fight Could Spawn More Appeals
Florida's long-running fight about water-quality standards for rivers, lakes and springs could be headed toward a federal appeals court in Atlanta.
Groups on both sides of the fight gave formal notice last week that they could appeal a federal judge's ruling about what are known as "numeric nutrient criteria" --- an issue that has drawn widespread attention from state policymakers, local governments, business lobbies and environmentalists.
The South Florida Water Management District also filed such a notice Wednesday, though an attorney said the move was largely procedural. The district wants to make sure it is in a legal position to address issues that might be raised by other groups or agencies.
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» Read the full story in the News-Press online
4/23/2012
Florida Warmer, Wetter Over Last 116 Years, Analysis Shows
Florida has gotten slightly warmer and a little wetter overall since standardized record keeping began in 1895. This is according to a state-by-state analysis by Christopher Burt, the weather historian for the private forecasting service Weather Underground.
“There are some surprises, but by and large the trend is certainly towards warmer and wetter conditions in most regions of the country,” he said.
The state has seen increases in precipitation of 4.4 percent over the long-term average, while temperatures have edged up just 0.4 degrees.
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» Read the full story in the Palm Beach Daily News
4/23/2012
USGS Makes Historical Maps Available Online
In 1884, the second USGS Director John Wesley Powell briefed Congress on the need for a national mapping program, stating, "The map once constructed should be enduring…"
In keeping with that spirit, The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has publicly released more than 161,000 digitally scanned historical maps spanning in excess of 130 years and covering the conterminous lower 48 states. This Historical Topographic Map Collection provides a comprehensive repository of the landscape of our Nation and tracks changes through time, providing essential clues critical in the understanding of our Nation's topography, geography and development.
"Just as parents might keep a photo album to record their children as they grew, these historical maps are the cartographer's physical quantification of how the land changed as the Nation grew over the last 130 years," explained USGS Director Marcia McNutt. "This historical collection contains immense scientific value as we shaped the land that shaped us."
With the recent completion of the states of Massachusetts and Florida, the Historical Topographic Map Collection can now offer, for free download, digital versions of the USGS legacy topographic map series which includes all scales and all editions originally published for the entire continental U.S.
As chartered, the USGS topographic mapping program has accurately portrayed the complex geography of our nation through maps in the lithographic printed format. Since the official release of the digital, scanned collection this past September, more than 1.2 million historical topographic maps have been downloaded from the website– an average of more than 5,700 maps per day.
These chronological historical maps are an important national resource as they provide the long-term record and documentation of the natural, physical and cultural landscape. The history documented by this collection and the analysis of distribution and spatial patterns is invaluable throughout the sciences and non-science disciplines. Genealogists, historians, anthropologists, archeologists and others can use this collection for research as well as a framework on which a myriad of information can be presented in relation to the national landscape.
The maps are offered to the public at no cost in GeoPDF format or as a printed copy for $15 plus a $5 handling charge from the USGS Store and can be used in conjunction with the new USGS digital topographic map, the US Topo.
Similar historical maps for Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Pacific Territories will be available later this summer.
» Visit the USGS Historical Map Collection Online
