From Tampabay.com:

MYAKKA RIVER STATE PARK – Standing 80 feet above the subtropical forest floor, the swamps and hardwood hammocks don’t look quite so hot and buggy. Still sweating from the short hike and climb, two kids in tow, the gentle breeze makes me forget it’s the dead of summer. But that’s the beauty of the Myakka Canopy Walkway. Even a short visit will leave you with an elevated perspective.

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From Newswise Science News:

Now ecological scientists—well positioned because of their field of study—are stepping up to do their part in getting children back to nature. The Symposium “No child left indoors: Ecologists linking young people with nature” will be held during the joint meeting of ESA and the Society for Ecological Restoration.

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An interview with canopy expert Dr. Meg Lowman:
Canopy research is key to understanding rainforests

Interview

From ScienceCareers.org:

The decision to mesh motherhood with a nascent career as an environmental biologist wasn’t one that Margaret Dalzwell Lowman (AKA Canopy Meg) had the luxury of choosing. Rather, it was a lifestyle born out of necessity.

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Sent by the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency · 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW · Washington DC 20460 · 202-564-4355

Contact: Suzanne Ackerman, (202) 564-4355 / ackerman.suzanne@epa.gov

Everyone has a role in protecting our environment, including members of Generation Y. EPA is tapping into their innovation and creativity in finding solutions to environmental challenges through the agency’s People, Prosperity and the Planet competition. The agency plans to award up to $1.25 million in grants that enable teams of college students to research, develop and design scientific and technical solutions to sustainability challenges that protect the environment while achieving continued economic prosperity.
EPA will award as many as 50 grants up to $10,000 each to student teams. The money will be used to research and develop sustainable solutions during the 2007-08 academic year. In spring 2008, the teams will be invited to bring their designs to Washington, D.C. to compete for EPA’s P3 Award, which includes an additional award worth up to $75,000 to further develop and implement the project in the field. The competition will be judged by the National Academy of Engineering for design innovation and technical merit along with relevant social, economic and environmental considerations that are the keys to sustainable designs.
The P3 competition is open to teams of students attending colleges, universities and other post-secondary educational institutions. Interdisciplinary teams are strongly encouraged, including representatives from multiple engineering departments and/or departments of chemistry, architecture, industrial design, economics, policy, social sciences, business, communication, etc.
The grants will be awarded for research related to the P3 (People, Prosperity, and the Planet) sustainability competition, a national student design competition launched in 2004.
Proposals must reach EPA by December 21, 2006.

Herald Tribune Article by Kazuaki Nagata

New College of Florida students and Sarasota County residents got to explore Red Bug Slough on Sept. 2 as part of a special guided tour hosted by the college.

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Adina Paytan Drinking with a Lobster!

Biography The major focus of Dr. Paytan’s research is understanding marine biogeochemical cycles in the present and the past. Dr. Paytan was born and raised in Israel and after a mandatory military service of two years went traveling to India and Nepal and hiking the Himalayas for another two years. She got her B.Sc. double major in Biology and Geology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Realizing how important science education is to the well-being of our planet I pursued a M.S. degree in science education at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Dr Paytan developed a curriculum in field geology for high school students, which has been implemented successfully and then got another masters degree, this time in oceanography, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her thesis was on oxygen isotope exchange between water and phosphate via biological cycling. In 1989 she moved (with Ron) to San Diego to take part in the Ph.D. Graduate program at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Her thesis was on marine barite as a recorder of oceanic chemistry, productivity and circulation. After 6 years she graduated with a degree and a daughter (Tali) and stayed in San Diego (UCSD) for a post doc, this time producing a high resolution sea water S isotope curve for the past 120 Ma. In the summer of 1999 Dr. Paytan moved to Stanford (as part of the new Ocean Program and the Environmental Science, Engineering and Policy Program) and since then is working as an assistant professor in oceanography at the department of Geological and Environmental Sciences.

Research Interests: Dr. Paytan’s principal research interests lie in the fields of paleoceanography, chemical oceanography and marine biogeochemistry. The goal of her research is to use the chemical and isotopic record enclosed in sea water and marine sediments to study present and past biogeochemical processes. This research spans a wide range of temporal (seasons to millions of years) and spatial (molecular to global) scales. An over-arching goal of this research is to link changing ocean composition to global changes in climate and tectonics. In addition Dr. Paytan is interested in natural and anthropogenically induced perturbation that effect biogeochemical processes in the ocean such as methane emission from wetlands, trace metal recycling in sediments, aerosol impact on marine biota and coastal water pollution. Biography Dr. Paytan focuses her work on the causes and consequences of climate change and coastal pollution. Trained as an oceanographer she uses the chemical signatures recorded in seawater, sediments, and living organisms to understand how the Earth System responds to natural and human induced climate and environmental changes over seasons to millions of years time scales. Dr. Paytan is the author of over 60 scientific publications, including review articles on barite and on the P cycle. She has received numerous awards including the AGU – Oceanography Early Career Award, NSF Early CAREER Award and the NASA New Investigator Award. She is currently and assistant professor in the department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University.

The Elmira Star-Gazette takes a look at the second Meg Lowman Treetop Camp at Tanglewood Nature Center:

A close look at nature was a way 12 girls could appreciate the opportunities around them as they attended the second Meg Lowman Treetop Camp at Tanglewood Nature Center and Museum this week.

The camp ended Friday afternoon with a glass-working session, a look at photographs the campers took earlier in the day and a gigantic water balloon fight.

Full Article

From scgovNEWS:

SARASOTA (THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2005) – Thanks to an innovative partnership between Sarasota’s scientific, educational and economic communities, Sarasota County may soon have a scientific field station in the Myakka Watershed that will cultivate intellectual and financial capital and address future ecological needs.

In September, approximately 20 scientists from around the country arrived in Sarasota to assist in choosing a site for the station, which would serve as a base camp for research and education and monitor the ecological health of Southwest Florida.

The meeting was funded by the TREE Foundation, a local scientific group that built the canopy walkway in Myakka River State Park. It was coordinated in conjunction with the Economic Development Corporation, Sarasota County and New College of Florida. Scientists from around the country, including Dayna Baumeister, Ph.D., of the Biomimicry Guild in Helena, Mont., and John Fitzpatrick, Ph.D., of Cornell University, visited four sites within the Myakka Watershed for the research station. Most favored T. Mabry Carlton Jr. Memorial Reserve.

A field station in the Myakka Watershed would attract researchers and graduate students, funding an economic boon to Sarasota County through ecotourism, summer science camps and a visitors center for educational exhibits, according to Dr. Meg Lowman, director of Environmental Initiatives at New College of Florida.

Lowman says the station would attract scientists searching for unique ecosystems to explore, and cites the successful Archbold Field Station in central Florida as an example. “The Archbold offers a scrub ecosystem within walking distance of beds, a library and a kitchen,” said Lowman. “The combination has drawn researchers from throughout the county, the majority from northern universities, resulting in more than 1,100 scientific publications documenting its plants, animals and ecology.”

Lowman expects similar results with a research facility here. “Just over 50 texts have been published in Sarasota County, all limited to one species, the scrub jay,” noted Lowman. “All of these [other] systems are vastly unknown,” she added. Ecosystems provide lots of free services for human beings, such as prevention of soil erosion, nutrient cycles dependent for the quality of our health and life. To keep them working for us we need to understand how they work.”

Rob Patten, executive director for Sarasota County Environmental Services, says the field station could also fuel valuable research into the burgeoning science of biomimicry, which studies nature and then applies its designs and processes to solve human problems. “This is a unique partnership that will enable environmental decisions to be based on both economics and biology,” said Patten, who believes the station could be a model for similar collaborations in the future.

Lowman says the next step in creating the field station is to apply for funding, with eventual construction beginning by 2008.

For more information on the field station, contact the Sarasota County Call Center at (941) 861-5000