For the past five years, Northwest Florida Aquatic Preserve has been working on a grant funded by Deepwater Horizon Program’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) to add additional plantings of native vegetation to the islands at Project GreenShores II, place informational signage, remove invasive species and debris, and conduct monitoring.  

Recently NWFLAP staff participated in the 32nd annual Day of Caring Event organized by United Way of Northwest Florida. We hosted a group of volunteers to help us with our first planting event of the season! On Day of Caring, 68 projects and 713 volunteers came together across two counties to make an impact in our local community. We partnered once again with Pensacola Energy to kick off planting season on the islands of Project Greenshores.

Through the Pensacola and Perdido Bay Estuary Program’s Collaborative Science to Assess Restoration Success (C-STARS) project, our team has been investigating the relationship between living shorelines and seagrasses. At one site, Project GreenShores (PGS), a large-scale living shoreline site in downtown Pensacola, 2 different species of seagrasses (Halodule wrightii and Ruppia maritima) have been confirmed, but not mapped.

Rocky Bayou Aquatic Preserve is one of Florida’s smallest aquatic preserves, but that doesn’t diminish its diverse population of a variety of large fish and additional aquatic species.

Sincerely,

Paige Plier