Over the past several months you may have picked up a tide of media coverage about the Florida Coastal Everglades (FCE) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) research in your favorite news source, be it a hard copy newspaper, radio, television, or online science blog. Rising seas have put Everglades and everyone in the South Florida in the same boat and at FCE, all hands are on deck to discover new solutions that will help tackle the imminent threat.
On April 22, President Barack Obama used the Everglades as the backdrop to his speech commemorating Earth Day 2015. He spoke about climate change and rising seas with South Florida scientists, including FCE LTER’s Lead Principal Investigator Evelyn Gaiser. In the days preceding the President’s visit, Gaiser and colleagues did the rounds in Washington, DC, including a visit to the White House to brief the President’s science people on what was going on in the Everglades. She also gave interviews to media organizations such as the National Public Radio and shared her messages linking the Everglades ecology with the rising seas with audiences through articles published in popular news media such as the Washington Post.
Subsequently this summer, NPR interviewed FCE collaborator Tiffany Troxler in a follow-up story about the science of rising seas, featuring a story about peat collapse that you do not want to miss!
FusionTV followed with another broadcast bearing the message of rising seas, “Everglades Under Attack”, working with Gaiser and FCE graduate student Nick Schulte.
Even more recently, CNN interviewed FCE collaborator Henry Briceño about the challenges of rising seas.
Alongside this burst of media attention, FCE researchers worked with videographer Rich Kern to produce a citizen science short film that is now showing around South Florida and beyond, raising awareness of coastal and estuarine ecology (see Everglades section at Odyssey Earth, Encounters in Excellence, http://www.odysseyearth.com/encounters-in-excellence/). Kern just finished his annual classroom and high school auditorium presentations of the film “You, Me, and the Sea” to over nine thousand Miami-Dade secondary students, who then met and learned from the FCE researchers featured in the film.
Stay tuned for more FCE research in the news!