Stewardship - Preserving Native Biodiversity

NATIVE BIODIVERSITY
Native biodiversity is the variety of naturally occurring plants and wildlife. Each species reinforces an extensive and intricate, delicately balanced food web in its home range.

BIODIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
Florida is one of the more biologically diverse parts of the United States, including species common to temperate North America and tropical West Indies. The number of temperate species progressively decreases, and the number of tropical species increases, moving from north to south through the Florida peninsula.

PRESERVING BIODIVERSITY
Preserving biodiversity of the Deering Estate at Cutler requires understanding and managing the flora and fauna in an ecosystem context. An ecosystem is made up of organisms and their interactions with each other and abiotic conditions and processes.

Since its original purchase in 1984, Deering Estate Natural Resources Management staff have developed a site Biological Assessment and Monitoring program. Data are collected and catalogued on species occurrence and relative abundance among different habitat types.

The primary goal of this program is to develop and adapt multi-species, habitat-specific management strategies to support flora and fauna species conservation. These strategies are coordinated with the objectives of federal and state species-specific recovery plans, and are in compliance with the Deering Estate at Cutler's Management Plan and the Natural Areas Protection Plan. This framework is used to prioritize and guide the Estate's exotic species control objectives, hydrological and habitat restoration activities, and prescribed burn program.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT & STEWARDSHIP
Resource managers eradicate and control invasive plants and animals, protect listed species, manage habitats and wildlife, conduct habitat and hydrology restoration projects, and coodinate research projects and prescribed fires to sustain native biodiversity.

PRESCRIBED FIRE
Prescribed fire is a beneficial method of maintaining suitable habitat for native wildlife. Advance research and monitoring the results of these management actions are important in accessing the success of fire management strategies. Historically, fire suppression has greatly increased fuel levels which could cause hotter-burning fires that kill many species. Current policies encourage the reduction of fuels through prescribed burns, thinning, mechanical removal, or other means.

Fire management at the Estate includes monitoring the relationship of fuel loads to habitat quality for resident wildlife species in Pine Rockland and Coastal Salt Marsh habitats.

Estate and Natural Areas Management staff as well as independent researchers strive to: record and monitor quantity and quality of fuel loads in different vegetation types; identify types of numbers or resident wildlife species in and utilizing each habitat; and evaluate direct and indirect effects of fuels management on wildlife habitat.

Pre- and Post-burn monitoring of biological indicator species is important to measure effects of fire on habitat structure and its use by associated wildlife. A few methods by which monitoring can occurr include photo point comparisions and fuel level samples, capture-and-release animal trapping, and vegetation transects.