By Vanessa Henry
Florida is one of the top destinations for people to move to. New houses, stores and roads are harming the wild animals and plants of Florida.
Wildlands Conservation is a nonprofit organization based in Tampa that is working to help the indigenous animals and plants of Florida through research and conservation.
“Florida is continually changing and developing, and so what it does is it push[es] wildlife into smaller pockets,” said Executive Director David Sumpter.
Sumpter says that he has worked in multiple states, but Florida is one of the most interesting places to be located.
“There is no place like Florida. There are a lot of challenges because of what is going on between how quickly we are developing and the sensitivity of our natural areas,” said Sumpter.
Wildlands protects any animal or plant species that is a natural to Florida. Many species they protect are only located in Florida. This can be anything from the Florida panther to scrub jays.
One species known for being displaced with housing development is the gopher tortoise. Developers are interested in the land they occupy because it is high and dry uplands.
Wildlands provides gopher tortoise classes because the gopher tortoise is vital as a keystone species. If it were to be removed from an area, hundreds of other species would be affected. Its burrows are shelters for many animals including snakes, frogs and mice. The tortoise cohabits with other species because it cannot be eaten once it has aged enough for its shell to harden and be unbreakable. They primarily feed on grasses.
“We are one of the three organizations that are certified to teach gopher tortoise classes, gopher tortoise trainings, so that you are authorized to go out and conduct surveys and to relocate tortoises,” said Sumpter.
The organization highly considers plant life in their conservation practices because many are rare to Florida and are susceptible to being harmed by invasive species.
“This a really good place to be an ecologist because you’ve got really unique species and unique habitats in conflict with the interface between the environment and the development,” said Sumpter.
Wildlands Conservation has multiple projects and services with focuses on specific locations, plants and animals.
Projects, Services, and Mission
Wildlands has control of between seven to 10,000 acres of land in conservation. They maintain lands along Lake Wales Ridge, Polk County, Hillsborough County, Lee County, Pasco County and other areas in Florida, as well as in two other states.
They receive funding to their projects, services or directed research through grants given by state organizations or universities and board donations.
In one of their directed research cases, they worked with the Seminole Reservation to find exotic reptiles in their reservations.
“Florida being a semi-tropical or subtropical environment, everything can survive here,” said Sumpter. “The climate is such that if you release a species from South America, or Cuba or the islands, etc. it can thrive here.”
One of those reptiles was an Argentine Tegu, which also became an issue for the Fish and Wildlife Commission. Wildlands was contracted to do a study on the Tegu in southeast Hillsborough County. This invasive species came to Florida through the pet trade and was released after it grew to large. Wildlands set a grid of motion sensor cameras to find the higher concentrated areas of the animal. Afterwards, they trapped and removed it from the area.
Photo Courtesy Wildlands Conservation. MOULTRIE DIGITAL GAME CAMERA
Some of their services are land management and permitting conservation banks, mitigation banks and easements. Conservation banks are areas of land set aside for specific listed species that are in need of protection. Mitigation banks are wetlands. Conservation easements are areas of land owned by a private landowner.
Wildlands works with owners of conservation easements to decide a management strategy of the land for conservation. Those owners then sell credits to corporations or industries that are buying areas of land that are displacing species. The purpose is for corporations to be able to expand where they want, but pay for the damage they are causing.
One form of managing the lands includes prescribed burns. Although people may associate burning with negativity, especially after the California and Australia fires, burning in Florida is necessary. Fuel loads, the flammable areas around a fire, build up over time in Florida and if they are not treated, then catastrophic fires can occur and cause damage to property.
To prevent prescribed burns from getting out of hand, fire breaks are created. Florida species have adapted to burns by running or flying away and hiding in burrows. Sumpter explains that Florida is known for burning.
“Natural Florida burns and if you don’t burn or don’t keep up with it, then the habitat characteristics that all these species that live there and are adapted to cease to exist,” said Sumpter. “We are the lightning capital of the world … so natural Florida burns.”
David Sumpter, Executive Director of Wildlands Conservation
The burns are meant to treat overgrown plants in the areas, as well as remove invasive species. Natural Florida animals require certain levels of leaf litter on the ground and low plant levels to survive. If those levels get out of hand, then the species will not survive.
Their research studies range from analyzing whether plants and animals will return to a saltern environment if remade, to their newest endeavor of studying the probability of occurrence for reptiles in the Lake Wales Ridge.
This two-year study, if approved, will be funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services and will reveal the number of reptiles, their locations and their risk level in the Lake Wales Ridge.
Though they work in many areas on many environmental topics, Wildlands Conservation has a very simple mission.
“We conserve wildlands.”
-David Sumpter
In the field & In the headquarters
Wildlands Conservation has been around for almost 20 years. They occupy a multi-office building; going down the halls there are physical therapists, medical facilities, and florists.
The drive from their New Tampa office to reach their Lake Wales location is almost two hours. Ecologist, Tara Rambo, makes drives throughout their locations in Florida anywhere from two to four times a week. The Lake Wales location is not even the farthest. Rambo says when the locations take more than three hours to travel, they book a hotel to stay the night.
Land Manager Joel DeAngelis, must keep constant track of these locations to determine fire breaks and when to burn.
The Lake Wales site is extensive. Many times, their clothes can get caught to one of the plants or they are thwacked by branches. Seeds from one of the invasive species can even get stuck to their clothes and hair. After removing it they have to keep it in their car as it is very easily spread and hard to destroy once it is in an environment.
They walk around the sandy areas of the Lake Livingston Conservation Bank to study the leaf litter levels that the sand skink is known to thrive in. They have placed pit tags in these habitats for those previously caught and analyzed to understand and keep a handle of the population. They also have to avoid getting pricked by many cacti.
The best way to describe some of their research and work ethic is simple.
“A combination of trapping, the use of motion sensor cameras, and just elbow grease,” said Sumpter.
Their job in the field and in the office is to focus on these wildlands in Florida.
“Our job is to try to protect in some way, shape, or form those areas that are most sensitive.”
-David Sumpter, Executive Director of Wildlands Conservation
Outreach
Four out of the last five years, Wildlands Conservation has won the University of South Florida Fast 56 award.
They give bird walks and frog listening networks where they teach people frog calls to determine their locations.
“They are like the canary in the coalmine, depending on which frogs you have in a certain area tells you a lot about the health in the area.”
Wildlands provides internships for college students throughout Florida. Some have backgrounds in environmental science or biology but depending on their interests interns can work with anything like geographic information systems or wildlife biology by going out into the field for bird or reptile and amphibian surveys.
Sumpter has a canvas print of him and his sons in China hanging by his desk. He loves setting aside a time each year to travel somewhere with them from Florida to Australia. He truly wants his children to experience the whole world.
“I think that’s all of our thrust, is for the next generations to be able to have this wildlands that we got to appreciate,” said Sumpter.
For any person interested in Wildlands Conservation, whether with questions or concerns or looking to support their local environment, the organization can be reached at their website.
“If people are in need of some advice or expertise when it comes to wildlife and wildlife management, I think that we are a go to resource,” said Sumpter. “We get calls every single day about gopher tortoise, about what do I do about this situation, just wondering about certain things and how they should handle certain situations where they are in conflict with wildlife.”
“To us, I think the most important thing is to conserve our natural heritage.”
-David Sumpter
