OysterCatcher Winter 2025

The partnership between the Reserve and the ED Corps High School is flourishing in its third year. This semester, students began by examining our watershed from the sky! They observed clouds and used watercolors to paint them in their nature journals which allows the eye to slow down and pay attention to details that might otherwise be missed. After painting, students wrote down questions that arose from their observations. For example, why are clouds sometimes grey, or how much water does it take to form a cloud? Then they used the nature journal strategy, “It reminds me of…”, to connect their observations to other perspectives and disciplines. Some of their questions led to research about how long an average drop of water stays in a cloud, in the river, in ground water, and in the ocean. What began as a study of clouds resulted in a deeper student-driven understanding of the water cycle.
The next month, students created a map of the marsh grass at the Reserve. This grass, Spartina alterniflora, is planted by Franklin County fifth graders, including some of the ED Corps students. The grass is studied again by county seventh graders who look at the food web created in the marsh. Through mapping the grass, students were able to look at the relationship between the oyster breaks, the grass, erosion, and sea level rise. Students imagined and mapped what they thought the shoreline looked like 100 years ago, and what it will look like 100 years from now.
Currently, the class is comparing water parameters such as salinity, turbidity, and temperature in the Apalachicola and St. Joe Bays. As well as studying the environment, the class took a day to clean up the Catpoint shoreline; they have become stewards as well as students of the watershed.
One member of the ED Corps class is now interning with Lisa Bailey, the Reserve’s aquarist, caring for animals in the Nature Center and with Anita Grove on the Stewardship Series classes for adults. Two previous students have received paid internships to work at the Reserve. We value our partnership as it continues to benefit the community.


Drone the NERRS

This summer the Reserve completed field work for the Drone the NERRs Science Collaborative grant. This grant is a project between six National Estuarine Research Reserves including Apalachicola, Chesapeake Bay, Rookery Bay, Great Bay, Wells, and South Slough. The project goals are to test the efficacy of a protocol to characterize important marsh habitats using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and develop a Community of Practice to support those conducting surveys and performing analysis using resulting data. Because the project looks at the long-term vegetation monitoring data, contractors performed on the ground vegetation surveys this summer. We are currently in the process of comparing the ground surveys to the surveys conducted by drone flights. We hope to take the skills we learn from this collaborative project and apply them in our other monitoring program areas. We have currently have three staff members who have who have their Part 107 Pilot’s License, and we have been practicing utilizing drones in our monitoring.
Sea Turtle Nesting Season on Little St. George Island

The Reserve Stewardship team monitors Little St. George Island for sea turtle nesting activity May 1st through October 31st. As the season recently wrapped up, staff have been checking the nesting data to submit to Florida Fish and Wildlife. This year we had a total of 143 nests (125 loggerhead, 13 green, 5 unidentified) and 260 false crawls (251 loggerhead, 8 green, 1 unidentified). The biggest negative impacts to the nests in 2024 were wash over, wash outs, and sand accretion mostly from the storm surge resulting from Hurricane Debby at the beginning of August and Hurricane Helene at the end of September. Overall, it was a productive nesting season resulting in 8,006 hatched eggs from Little St. George Island!

Studying the Environment Through Plein Air Art


Reserve Education Specialist Melanie Humble has been chosen to participate in a residency with Michelle Held, a professional, accomplished artist who is a part of the 2025 Forgotten Coast en Plein Air event. Michelle will mentor Melanie in mastering the language of landscape and capturing the interplay of natural beauty and ecological challenges in vivid compositions. This immersive residency will allow Melanie to explore the art of storytelling through landscape painting in the unique and vulnerable environment of Apalachicola Bay. The residency will empower her to teach others in using art as a medium for exploring and understanding environmental awareness and lead her to engage adult learners through the transformative power of art.
“Apalachicola’s dramatic coastal landscapes, bathed in ever-changing light, offer a plein air artist’s dream. At the same time, these fragile ecosystems tell a deeper story of resilience and imbalance” says artist Michelle Held. “Environment change and human impact threaten the delicate harmony. This residency focuses on translating these narratives into compelling works of art that can inspire action and awareness, evoke an emotion and action, and turn natural beauty into a visual call for conservation.”
The Reserve will host demonstrations by Forgotten Coast en Plein Air artists Michelle Held, Olena Babak, Poppy Balser, Charles Dickinson, and Morgan Samuel Price on March 20th from 1:00-5:00 pm. They will capture the atmosphere, tradition and lifestyle of the fishing community of Eastpoint and the surrounding beauty around the Reserve. Following the demonstrations there will be a discussion by the artists, and Michelle and Melanie will describe their residency and show the paintings they produced.
The residency exhibit will be on display at the Reserve on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 18 and 19, from 9:00 am-4:00 pm and Thursday, March 20, from 9:00 am-5:00 pm. Friday, March 21, the exhibit move to at the Armory in Apalachicola where it can be viewed daily from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm until Sunday, when the event closes at 3:00 pm.
This event is free to the public. For more information go to https://www.forgottencoastenpleinair.com/schedule-2025/event-four-3mrac. This is the 20th year of documenting the landscape and culture of the Forgotten Coast. Forgotten Coast en Plein Air, America's Great Paint-out, is among the world's most prestigious plein air events.
Meet ANERR’s new Margaret A. Davidson Fellow
The Reserve welcomed our new Margaret A. Davidson (MAD) Fellow, Harald “Harry” Mumma, in August! The MAD Graduate Fellowship is a two-year program that provides the opportunity for graduate students to conduct research at a National Estuarine Research Reserve.
Harry is a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, pursuing his PhD in environmental engineering. His project at the Reserve is based upon assessing estuarine productivity and metabolism across different benthic (bottom) environments. Harry will achieve this by monitoring air-gas exchange at the surface, by monitoring the productivity within the water column, and by measuring the benthic-water column exchange. Putting these pieces together will provide a more complete view and understanding of how seasonal cycles and riverine discharge affect estuarine productivity. Harry will be with the Reserve through 2026 and we’re looking forward to working with him over the course of his project.


Stephanie Roscoe Takes on SET Sampling
The Reserve’s biannual surface elevation table (SET) sampling has been completed for 2024. Sampling occurs each spring and fall at ten wetland sites located throughout the Apalachicola Bay system. Each site contains two SET stations where surface elevation measurements are conducted. Marker horizons (cores) are also extracted and measured. This monitoring project was created in 2012 to describe long-term elevation and accretion change in wetland sediments.
Fall sampling included our new team member, Stephanie Roscoe. Stephanie joined us in September and works with both the Research and Stewardship sections. She will be overseeing the Reserve’s Wetlands and Water Levels program, which includes SETs.
Stephanie was born and raised in central Washington where she grew up playing outside, collecting bugs, and loving all critters. Her love for nature led her to the University of Montana where she pursued a bachelor's degree in terrestrial wildlife biology. While in school, Stephanie volunteered on various wildlife projects such as processing trail camera photos, setting up grizzly bear hair snags, and reporting hunter harvests at check stations. After graduating in Spring 2023, Stephanie worked on a sea turtle and coastal species project for U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) capturing and tagging sea turtles, terrapins, tiger sharks, and tripletail. Most recently, she worked as a wild turkey technician for the University of Nebraska, capturing and tracking hens as they made nest attempts and raised their poults. Stephanie is excited to learn new skills and gain relevant experience at the Reserve which will only help further develop her career.




Cornerstone Learning Center Helps Clean Up the Reserve
Students from the Cornerstone Learning Community based in Tallahassee visited the Reserve this fall and completed a service project. Eighteen students assisted in cleaning signage and trimming vegetation along the boardwalks. Afterward they cleaned up trash from the beach behind the Nature Center. As a thank you for their work, Reserve staff Lisa Bailey and Melanie Humble set up the outdoor classroom with monarch butterfly eggs under digital microscopes and caterpillars in cages in various life cycle stages. While some students drew the life cycle of the monarch in a nature journal, others learned about migration of the butterflies, then tagged and released them. The students also had a tour of the Nature Center.


Seventh Graders Return to Reserve to Monitor Marsh Grass
Every seventh grader in Franklin County visited the Reserve this Fall. Seventh grade programs included nature journaling, tagging monarchs, and assessing the marsh grass food web in the spartina marsh that the students helped plant when they were in 5th grade. The presence of periwinkle snails as a proxy species were counted indicating a robust ecosystem.

