Environment

Hurricane Ian decimated Southwest Florida beaches last September, but it does not bother sea turtles this summer: the nesting season is on track to be one of the best in recent years

More temperatures in the 100s were forecast in the southern parts of Southwest Florida on Sunday.

The planet’s temperature spiked this week to its hottest day in at least 44 years and likely much longer.

Hurricane Ian’s landfall on Sept. 28 last year helped foster a red-tide-a-thon that lasted eight months. Now there have been seven blue-green algae health advisories in Lee County alone since May

A new law is paving the way for radioactive roads in Florida. But environmentalists say it would affect road construction workers, harm plant and wildlife, and potentially kill precious Florida springs.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is now accepting requests for water-quality grants from local governments, academic institutions, and nonprofits. More than $390 million is available to plan and put into practice projects that protect Florida’s water resources.

The planet’s temperature spiked on Tuesday to its hottest day in at least 44 years and likely much longer, and Wednesday could become the third straight day Earth unofficially marks a record-breaking high, the latest in a series of climate-change extremes that alarm but don’t surprise scientists.The globe’s average temperature reached 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a common tool based on satellite data and computer simulations and used by climate scientists for a glimpse of the world’s condition. On Monday, the average temperature was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (17.01 degrees Celsius), breaking a record that lasted only 24 hours.

Southwest Florida is so rich in wildlife habitat and has so many threatened and endangered species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to add the region to the world’s largest network of protected lands. The Southwest Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Area

Florida Ports Council President and CEO Mike Rubin is raising alarms that proposed changes to protect an endangered whale species could economically hurt ports from Tampa to Pensacola.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is nearing the end of a public-comment period on a petition from conservation organizations to establish a year-round 10-knot vessel speed limit in the “core” habitat area of the endangered Rice’s whale.Rubin wants the petition tossed.

Several thousand redfish raised 17 miles inland are now swimming freely in Sarasota Bay.Those are the first of 20,000 redfish raised nowhere near a bay or inlet, but at Mote Marine’s Aquaculture Research Park, a 200-acre inland fish farm along Fruitville Road east of Interstate 75,