Staff Writer

Students from the Osceola County School for the Arts are participating in a new hands-on environmental education program aimed at bringing students closer to nature.

The South Florida Water Management District started the Legacy program and is partnering with four sites in its 16-county district in 2010-11 to provide outdoor learning experiences for students. Officials said they eventually hope to expand the program to all 16 counties.

“This is real Florida and there's not much of it left,” Dan Thayer, director of vegetation and land management for the water district, said. “We're trying to build a connection between our youth and our lands. If we can get the kids involved and get some ownership, they may be our future advocates for maintaining Florida's special places.”

The Osceola County students are surveying gopher tortoises' burrows at the Osceola County School District’s Scrub Site in the Reedy Creek watershed in the Poinciana area.  Nov. 18 was the first day of the program; students will return to the site in January, February and May.

“We're looking right now at ways we can grow this,” Thayer, who works closely with the Palm Beach County school involved in the program, said. “There are some really great science teachers out there.”

Covered in soot due to a recent controlled burn at the site, students from Deeanna Sipe's advanced placement environmental science class  at the arts school focused on 250-meter transects to determine the number of gopher tortoise burrows in the area. The burrows were then documented via a portable global positioning system, photographed and marked with stakes.

“It's not just busy work they're doing, it's real world data,” Bill Graf, senior intergovernmental and outreach specialist for the water district, said.

Senior Allie Zella, 17, and junior Erica Piper, 16, found three abandoned, inactive burrows and admitted the work was interesting and unique.

“I really don't do this kind of stuff,” Zella said.

“No one gets to do light field research,” Piper said.

With just one water district land manager per 50,000 acres, the data collected by students will be used to track the tortoises well as offset budget cuts, Ayounga Riddick, water district scientist, said.

The gopher tortoise is a keystone species, meaning it provides habitat for other animals, including snakes and gopher toads, Riddick said. The burrows are also easy to monitor because they are distinctive.

Craig Carr, an environmental resource specialist with the Osceola County School District who wrote the $8,000 grant for the Legacy project, said the gopher tortoise population is important to the populations of other species.

“We've been wondering about our (gopher tortoise) population,” he said. “They are a threatened species.”

Originally slated to become a Poinciana housing development, the Scrub Site property was purchased by the water district in 1995 through the Save Our Rivers Program because it is part of the upper Kissimmee River watershed.

David Snedeker, a school principal and the administrator for the Scrub Site, said 5,000 students visit the Scrub Site and its sister site, the Osceola County School District’s Environmental Study Center off Southport Road, annually.