Week 3-Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary

This week the class visited Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, The National Audubon Society’s flagship project.  It is a non-profit organization funded by private donations that help to maintain the park and trails.  The Sanctuary is the largest unlogged old growth cypress strand in the world and was created to protect the wading birds hunted for their plumage at the turn of the century.  The Sanctuary covers several habitats including pine flatwood, wet prairie, pond and bald cypress forests, marsh, and lettuce lakes.  These various habitats help support a diversity of plants and wildlife through rotating hydric periods while filtering water that passes through.  Over the decades the swamp has become a very popular place to visit.  This increase in visitors caused the sanctuary to build a “Living Machine”, a nature based sewage system that processes all the waste through bacteria and plants and then reuses the water in the restroom facilities on site.  This kept the sanctuary from having to dig and dredge a pipeline to connect with county waterlines, thus preventing damage to the surrounding environment.  Minimizing human impacts is the essential idea behind conservation and stewardship, conservation being the preservation of the untouched lands, and stewardship being maintaining and sharing the natural value of these areas.  These ideas are vital to saving natural areas around the world, allowing development in such sensitive ecosystems would drastically reduce biodiversity and probably lead to the extinction of many species.