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The Southwest Florida Music and Education Center in Naples will soon be offering neurodivergent young adults a truly unique, comprehensive music education program to help them pursue careers in the music industry.

Audubon’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Collier County has been an Audubon-protected site since the early 1900s and is considered a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance. Science-based land management practices protect the sanctuary’s 13,450 acres, including the world’s largest remaining, old-growth bald cypress forest. And it's home to a wide variety of plants and animals, including alligators, river otters, and many bird species including the threatened Wood Stork. It's also home to many plant species, including the incredibly rare "super" ghost orchid.We meet the sanctuary’s new director, Keith Laakkonen. Keith is a southwest Florida native with a background in watershed management, environmental policy, wildlife ecology, prescribed fire management, and more.

When it comes to gauging how risky it is to live where major hurricanes sometimes make landfall, the most important thing to know is what’s called the ‘return period.’ That is the estimated average time between such storms. But, because historic records only go back so far scientists use other ways to determine how frequent major storms have occurred in the past. One such technique is called paleoclimatology — or more specifically in the case of massive storms like Hurricane Ian, paleotempestology.We meet one of these scientists who is doing this kind of research work right here in Southwest Florida. Dr. Jo Muller is a paleoclimatologist and a Professor in the Department of Marine & Earth Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University. She studies past tropical cyclone activity by collecting core samples from lagoons and bays behind Southwest Florida’s barrier islands.

In his new book, “Fort Myers Historic Hurricanes” Tom Hall offers a history of severe storms that have impacted southwest Florida dating all the way back to 1841, but he also provides a dire warning about this area’s severe risk from hurricanes and storm surge in general. It opens with a hurricane in 1841 that swept across the region making landfall near Sanibel Island and bringing 14' of storm surge to the U.S. Army fort on Punta Rassa.

In the leadup to the midterm elections Governor Ron DeSantis announced that the state of Florida’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security had arrested 20 people who allegedly had knowingly registered to vote illegally during the previous election in 2020. He said this was the first step in addressing wide-scale voter fraud — despite there being no evidence of such fraud in Florida. The problem is, there is no straightforward way for former felons — or for election officials — to determine whether someone who has completed their sentence for a felony conviction has satisfied all requirements to be eligible to vote.

A new study led by scientists with University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences maps out the status of crocodile populations in south Florida over the past 40 years to learn how they’ve responded to changes in the Everglades ecosystem. "American Crocodiles as restoration bioindicators in the Florida Everglades" was published in PLOS ONE on May 19.

In order to track pollution and air quality in the Glades, a reporting team from The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica set up air sensors at people’s homes to monitor pollution on days when the state authorized cane burning and projected that the smoke would blow toward them. Health and air-quality experts say this kind of exposure does pose health risks both in the short term and over the course of the months during burn season. The interactive feature story was published on July 8.

During his more than five decades in public service, Ambassador Tony Hall has dedicated his life to alleviating world hunger. Ambassador Hall served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in 1966 and 1967 and upon returning to the U.S. was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives and then the Ohio state senate. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978 and easily retained that position until 2002.During his career Ambassador Hall has worked actively to improve human rights conditions around the world, especially in the Philippines, East Timor, Paraguay, South Korea, Romania, and the former Soviet Union. And in Congress, Congressman Hall introduced legislation to end the importation of conflict diamonds mined in regions of Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and legislation calling on Congress to apologize for slavery.

The United States has become increasingly polarized in recent years. New research published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace seeks to better understand what happens when democracies become ‘perniciously polarized’ — that’s when polarization has divided a society into two mutually antagonistic political camps, where each side sees the other as a threat to the country’s future. According to this research, polarization in the United States reached the level of pernicious in 2015 and remains so to this day.

Hurricane Ian impacted nearly 5-million acres of farm and grazing land, with about 700-thousand acres receiving Category 4 force winds. According to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food & Agricultural Sciences, or IFAS, early estimates put the economic impact just to agriculture in Florida at somewhere between 786 million and 1.56 billion dollars with citrus and vegetables most affected.