CONSERVATION

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED... 

Hurricane Helene has caused dramatic impacts to our communities and to natural resources in the Nature Coast region. Helene caused the highest storm surge ever recorded in Cedar Key, with over 13 feet storm surge (MLLW) recorded at the Cedar Key NOAA gauge. Most folks in our area were spared from storm surge impacts from Hurricane Milton, but the impacts of Helene created huge challenges for many of us. Regarding our facilities at NCBS and the Seahorse Key facilities we help manage, all received damage, which has been summarized on our social media and I won’t go into detail here.  
 
The outpouring of volunteers to our communities has made a huge impact on the initial recovery from this storm, and without those volunteers, we would be substantially delayed in any recovery efforts. We are all grateful for the folks who have taken their time to come to help, often from long distances and much personal expense. 
 
Every hurricane we have faced has created lessons about how to prepare for storms, but in my view the biggest lesson from Helene is that we are literally all connected. In ecosystem science the concept of connectivity is pervasive, where loss of one part of the system influences the rest of the food web. If you lose seagrass habitat, you functionally change the rest of the food web, all the way up to humans. Similarly, damage to oyster reefs, mangroves, and salt marsh all have cascading impacts to forage fishes, predators, sea birds, sea turtles and marine mammals.  

 
Communities along the coast are connected in the same way. If you lose key businesses in small communities, it has strong impacts to the community ecosystem overall. Working to find solutions to these challenges is our next step, once clean-up is completed. That said, I’m most encouraged by the strength and bond that our communities have. People work together to solve the problems step by step. There are many innovative solutions that are being discussed, such as having functional infrastructure that is mobile and can be moved out of harm’s way for approaching storms. Building things back to higher elevations and increasing the ease of mobility will make recovery faster when the next storm comes. It’s going to take everyone working together to recover, but that’s exactly what I see in the first month after these 2024 storms. Press on and innovate!