Last fall, TESI was awarded a $10,000 grant from the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida to educate the University of Florida (UF) community about Florida’s springs. More than 93,000 students, faculty, and staff make up the community at UF each year, and many of these community members learn about, visit, and recreate in the springs for the first time while at UF. The Swamp for the Springs project was created to educate the UF community about Florida’s springs and inform them of the ways they can act to protect springs resources.
We kicked off the campaign by incorporating Florida springs content into TESI’s Environmental Leaders Network trivia night. Teams competed for a manatee prize by sharing their knowledge about the ecological, cultural, and economic importance of Florida’s springs. Next, we debuted an interactive pop-up exhibit focused on the Swamp for the Springs key messages at UF’s Marston Science Library. Our tables featured interactive activities like Springs Pictionary – where students drew different spring organisms while learning fun facts about them – and Trivia Tic-Tac-Toe where participants could challenge their friends to test their knowledge of the plants, animals, and chemistry of Florida’s springs. We then brought these activities to the Florida Museum’s Museum Fest, where more than 1,600 visitors had the opportunity to engage with us about Florida springs. We later brought the pop-up exhibit to the Reitz Union North Lawn and the UF Office of Sustainability’s Sustainability-in-Action Showcase in April.
These activities were supported by two undergraduate student interns funded by the UF Gulf Scholars program. Abigail Davis and Riley Gallen helped develop educational activities, staffed our outreach tables, and created digital resources to further spread the Swamp for the Springs key messages. These interns and members of the TESI team embarked on two field visits to explore Florida springs first-hand, as well as collect photos and video to be used in educational materials. The crew visited Manatee Springs State Park and later completed a paddle at Ruth B. Kirby Gilchrist Blue Springs State Park to document ways to recreate responsibly at the springs. These experiences helped the students better understand the concepts of the Swamp for the Springs campaign and generated ample footage for future digital education projects.
We concluded the project’s spring activities with two events for UF students and the greater UF community. The first event was CSI Planet: Mystery of the Missing Manatee, where participants interacted with theater performers to solve a manatee mystery and learn about Florida’s springs along the way. The second event was a stewardship trip held in partnership with the Alachua Conservation Trust, featuring a litter clean-up and tour of Little Awesome Springs. We are grateful to our funders and partners for the support of our Swamp for the Springs activities this past spring. The campaign will run through next fall and we look forward to sharing more events and digital resources soon!
TESI’s Swamp for the Springs campaign is funded by the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida. The project is supported by two undergraduate student fellows, funded by the University of Florida Gulf Scholars program.
