The Great Yardening

  Hey everyone! This blog will continue to get updates, albeit much less frequently. The semester is closing out, and wow! It seems every topic has a massive amount of depth to it that I am blissfully unaware of, and Biodiversity is really deep!  I walked into this imagining that I'd be able to thoroughly catalogue plants and animals, not just within my yard, but the wetlands as well! How foolish!  That being said, every experience is a learning one. This course has taught me many valuable things about the tools that are so readily used in this field of work. One of the biggest barriers for me during the course was my limited access to geospatial tools. While phone technology is fantastic, my model of phone was not especially accurate, nor were the apps transcribing the data. In the end I had to manually transcribe coordinates and data into the google sheets. This was the first time I actually wrote a sheet to be transcribed into data points, and it was much less intimida...

  Hey Everyone! I have been busy behind the scenes adding more species and tagging them within the yard. While I am still missing some major species and some sections haven't fully been combed through, we do have pretty good identification on larger plants at this point.  Keeping the data within Google sheets has been useful as there is some tie in with Google Mymaps aswell, allowing for real time updating and tagging. This is particularly useful as I continue this journey mapping the yard.  This project has been a bit to expansive in scope for myself to do this semester entirely, but I can easily identify my next steps. Color coding points based on plant type Adding a legend for said plant types Establishing zones for larger more expansive plants such as Saw Palmettos rather than single points Establishing sample squares 3x3 to determine ground cover species in different regions Expanding survey into the wetlands Adding more categories to expand information (Currently na...

  Hey everyone! I have been stewing on starting a non-profit, have a decent number of ideas but not so much the avenues of continuous funding for services rendered. That being said, looking into how to start a non-profit is interesting enough to merit a look into. In the state of Florida it seems to be relatively simply laid out on the official government website. Review the instructions for filing the Articles of Incorporation for Florida Non-Profit Corporations . Gather all information required to complete the form. Have a valid form of payment . If additional space is needed to meet IRS filing requirements, prior to filing contact the Department of State at NewFilingsCorpHelp@DOS.MyFlorida.com for appropriate instructions. So there you have it, a shameless copy and paste! That being said, what exactly are the Articles of Incorporation? Tucked away behind that first hyperlink are a series of questions that would need to be filled out to attempt to establish non-profit status...

Hey All! At the beginning of this year, I was heavily involved with a Non-Profit known as Conservation Florida, and just now I decided to take a deep dive into what it is they are all about.  The main take away is that they are dedicated, honest workers that want to see the ecology of Florida restored and the prosperity of life within Florida. Here's a short slideshow about them.