Environment

Southwest Florida's most influential environmentalists share a report warning the next massive red tide or blue-green algae outbreak will be a multi-billion-dollar disaster.

The public has one more week to weigh in on a plan that essentially creates a city with critical panther habitat.

Last year’s sargassum bloom was so big it posed challenges on a hemispheric scale for marine ecosystems and coastal towns. The size of this upcoming summer’s fledgling bloom is setting records.

DeSantis has announced more than $340 million in grants to cities and counties throughout Florida in recent months to mitigate the effects and impacts of red tide and blue-green algae.

DeSantis has earmarked $30 million to pay for efforts to reduce blue-green algae in Caloosahatchee River and increase water quality

It's one of the last remaining truly rural areas in Lee County, but that, like many old relics of Southwest Florida it is threatened.

The water at Manatee Park in Lee County is normally filled with manatees looking for a less frigid refuge in the warm water just down from the Florida Power and Light Power Plant across the street during the cooler months of Southwest Florida's year.

A massive pump station to retrieve polluted water released from Lake Okeechobee into the headwaters of the Caloosahatchee River is completed — now it will sit idle

Imagine the surprise felt by sea turtle lovers when the number of egg-filled clutches laid on Southwest Florida beaches during last summer’s nesting season totaled a normal year despite shorelines transformed by Hurricane Ian.Even better: The mommas kept coming.Female sea turtles often return to the beach of their birth to nest every three years or so, which made understandable the fears of the large and active cadre of turtle volunteers that Category 5 Ian in September 2022 had rendered nesting beaches so unrecognizable the females would be lost, search aimlessly, then dump their eggs at sea.

Alligator Flag is a very large herbaceous plant that is common at the shallow water edges of south Florida ponds streams, and roadside ditches. It can be found year round and blooms primarily from early summer through the fall – then dies back to a great extent in mid-winter to emerge again in early spring. This native plant provides food, shelter, and often nesting sites for a great diversity of wildlife that can often be viewed from shore or from boardwalks such as at Corkscrew Audubon Sanctuary, Six-mile-Cypress Slough Preserve, and many other sites in south Florida.