The Gulf winds blow through canopy The Gulf winds blow through canopy roads all the way to Thomasville.

The native names written on the echoed through the red clay hill where the scent of long leaf Flo pine reach upon cross that Georgia Line.

Stroll through Tallahassee town or southern Appalachee bound, bo take the local routes and journey down the we call the home.

Take a local routes and journey down the roads we called our home.

>>Welcome to Local Routes, I█m Suzanne Smith with WFSU publ we called our home.

>>Welcome in Green Spaces and Rob caught u while Chris was working on a special installation at Le in Tallahassee.

A lot of times with gardeners, they say you have a g and I don't.

You'll see pretty soon that I have a lot of But as a grower, rather than a g I grow with love.

No green thumb.

I have a green heart.

So I have a lot of different gar and a lot of different healing spaces.

Chris Omni is creating a plant based installation for LeMoyne Arts in Tallahassee.

It's part of a Ph.D. in art education at FSU.

Not everything is perfect, but I wanted you to see, like, how I from beginning to end and the mi that I make along the way, the success that I make along th This was big enough to get a coating from it.

And then that's our new baby.

Hopefully they will all be about the same or pretty close.

So at one point I was fascinated by these and my colleague, who I have adopted as my my older brother, brother to cha Bartow, FSU.

He gave me a big pot of snake pl and I decided to take them apart and propagate them.

So the love that he shared with me I will share with other people at rain that we had yesterday was perfect timing for this.

I like to consider that Mother Earth giving us the free I am not trained in this.

My degree is not in this.

My degree will be a Ph.D. in our education, a master's degree in public heal None of that has anything to do with what we're doing right now.

This solid passion of love, the dissertation is really an ar based research study.

And my research question number what can we black women learn fr And then in parentheses, together in green spaces?

And I put the parentheses there because it could simply read, What can black women learn from just me going out?

So part of my research will be auto ethnographic where I record my stories of being in green spaces.

So when I first moved here from in June of 2020, it was COVID.

I didn't know anybody.

I'm a hugger.

And so I wanted to connect.

So my first form of connection was with a tree, and I have not lost that connect So what I'm going to do is cut them down so that in time after they sit i they will develop roots.

My goal is to get 50 cuttings and to have 50 people involved in this collective healing and collective growing.

The cuttings will hang on this b Chris, found by the side of the I'm looking for balance and bala to mean anything from going on e It could be the length.

It could be the curvature.

Does this balance with this?

This one right here gives me bal just a little bit more to level And I have a wishbone.

People may not see a wishbone, but I see a wishbone.

I see arms extended.

So wishing that love, wishing healing, wishing peace.

Chris makes a creative choice to The branch called.

The naked bark was beautiful by but I thought it wasn't going to be enough.

I just thought you know, to me, nature is beautiful.

But in the museum, as a part of the nature's gems, I didn't think it was enough.

So I second guess what my natural beauty I was and opted for paint and I thought it looked nice, but I knew it wasn't as nice as it could look because it's not just the natura Chris consults with Lemoine and on a change of direction.

And having that honest conversat and with Powell.

And for her to just gently say, We are looking for something mor that will flow the exposed bark would be really And an amber and.

I think I thank you.

Oh my God.

Okay.

It is about me seeing the shadows on the wal and thinking about the five years that I've worked on myself emotionally and spiritually afte my mama died in 2016.

It is about the little pieces of There are healing gardens and little pieces.

Through propagation and propagation only works when you take care of the parent So I've been taking care of my p plants for the last five years.

Thank you for being on this jour I'm a big marshmallow, so that's just part of the journ But this is propagating joy here at LeMoyne Art Museum.

The ancestors have opened these and I proudly walk in them.

And I have this conversation abo and especially black joy in green spaces that we do operate in these spac And this is just a piece of me and this is just the beginning.

For WFC, I'm Rob Diaz de Vegas.

Over a year ago, Rob gave us an up close look at the Lake Jackson dry down and its cause.

Well, this past summer, the lake was holding water again So Rob headed out on a new eco a with Tom Zywicki.

Tom is with Florida A&M Groundwa Biodiversity Lab.

Together, he and Rob went on a h for a new creature that is found at Lake Jackson.

TOM So Nikki's lab discovered a new species of found in Lake Jackson and nowher BEETLE Only today they can't fin So I'm finding insect larvae and tadpoles and finding, oh, fish.

PRINGLE Onyx Appalachia is about as an entry in the lab.

Had previously found it here at the edge of the lake.

But that was before the lake dried down in 2021.

The question is, where did it go last year?

We all got a good look at Porter Sink in Lake Jackson Dye traces have connected the si to a call this brings.

It's this connection that brough a few years ago.

I was working with the Wakulla S Alliance and my graduate student came out We took a boat out the water her You can see how it gets dry down The water levels were high enoug Folks around here know you can g this is a boat landing.

You actually take a boat and boa right out into the lake.

And we did it that day.

The water levels were at least a couple of meters, maybe five, six feet higher than they are.

Right now.

And there are a whole bunch of u in the boats.

My graduate student decided to y go ahead and teach you water sam I'm going to stay here and just see what I can find.

She's detonating right around this type of area h You have all this grass and it was really kind of semi-a what you would call the upper littoral zones, the very edge of where the lake and the land meet.

And he's just has a net and he j of radiates moving around in thi And up comes these specimens.

But we got to make the lab.

We realized they were a genus ca Onyx, and that was of interest t It looked like something called Crank Explorer, Dana's.

Crank Onyx, Florida.

And this is a small crustacean that has been identified in wate all over Florida.

But Tom is finding that many of those IDs may have been that instead they were closely r species of crank, onyx.

In recent years, he and his lab have discovered several new species of small cru And here in Lake Jackson, they found one more.

These small animals are a critic of freshwater food webs.

They are important in terms of a food source for small fish.

And so they're going to be reall really important in terms of, yo small fish, even pods, large fish eat the small fish.

So if the pod population collaps that can certainly have an effec on sports fishing, for instance, in the re So what we found, it was it would have been this type of right here just a little wetter.

Now it's pretty dry.

For the first time since Lake Jackson dried down.

Tom and his current graduate stu are looking for Kringle, Onyx, A There is life in there.

Not sure what that is.

Some sort of beetle, maybe.

I'm really surprised.

You know, you find Halo and usua here in really high numbers.

Primarily, we're using the.

Smaller nets for the surrounding that are very shallow and the bigger nets for the deep where I mean, if clouds are kind of al they live in a variety of differ environments.

And considering the water level being lower, it probably changed where the amphibians reside.

One of the things we postulated our paper was that we found repo throughout the 20th century of dry islands, and then we foun in Tallahassee, Democrat, going back to the 19th century.

So it certainly seems that this would be something that any that would be endemic to this so of what we call prairie lake habitat would be adapted to these dry do Which begs the question, what do And none of the none of the answ that we have at this moment are really satisfact One idea is that Pringle Annex Epilog retreats from the edge of to smaller pools of water.

If the lake dries down and if th surviving in little small pools, maybe it takes them a while to fully move out from those poo back to occupy all potential habitats in Lake.

That's that's possible.

During the past year of lower wa new vegetation has grown out from the edge of the lake.

This grass likely grew after it dried down.

You know, you had sort of the wa coming up to the edge of the lak and you had this grassy layer right on the edge of the lake.

But it's not it's not the same i not the same type of habitat.

I don't know how important that Presumably important, considerin we're not finding anything yet.

Hey, Joshua, this might be a good place just to try the brush pump.

Another possibility is that Cran got an example as he moves down instead of out.

What if these animals do go inte In other words, if they do go down into the grou and live between those fine gree then this would be one way that potentially we could pull t But I don't hold much hope for i But it's worth a shot.

Wow, look at that.

Question is just how would they in conditions down there?

Because clearly not a lot of oxy not a lot of decomposition going Right.

There's another possibility here that these things because we collected these things in Oct So there may be a seasonal aspec to their emergence, which would potentially explain why we're not seeing anything here in June.

To find out how can Gore-Tex Appalachia adapts to the wet and cycles of a prairie lake like Lake Jackson.

They're going to have to come ba periodically over the course of several years for WFC.

I'm Rob Diaz, the Vegas.

Rob's next eco adventure is not I would personally volunteer for but it is one that I am happy to watch on scre He headed out to the Nature Conservancy's Appalachia call a and ravines preserve in order to watch the release of 26 indig Yeah, this is one that I am happy to watch from af All right.

Going this way.

One, two, three.

Good.

This is a really complex underta We're messing around with a list species, right?

We've got to do it right.

So I just wanted to make sure everybody understands that.

Yes, man, it is super cool to re this on the Nature Conservancy p but this is a very large underta with a whole lot of partners.

Okay.

This year we released 26 individ snakes, roughly 11 females and 15 males.

This is the largest number of sn that we've released since we sta the reintroduction out here at t and Ravines Preserve.

Got 26 snakes here.

They all have a pit tag, which i It's a non transmitting identifi that's inserted in them.

We're verifying that those numbe with what's in our spreadsheet h Suitable Burrows have been flagg so we're just going to try and f Release a snake into it and we'l the GPS coordinates of the burro And what snake went in there?

The snakes IDs are on the flaggi so try not to lose that before we release the snake.

I would like to think within three years post-release, that's when they would start to I mean, I imagine they're already sexual at the date of release, but this guy's just going to come ou Finding a mate in a large landsc especially being a zoo raised an You know, there's a little bit of acclimation that the snake ne to even become part of, like, you know, reproductive part of t I know.

Yeah.

He'll be like my problem.

Took a whole lot of people.

It took a whole lot of resources and dedication to even bring this habitat to the current condition that it And it requires maintenance.

It requires us to be out here stewarding the land, applying prescribed fire every two years so that this system continues to It continues to be a place that Eastern Indigo, as well as.

Now, this next story is one that I actually do wish I had seen in Rob follows the life cycle of a butterfly from egg to He says the secret to experienci yourself is to plant Passionflower in you and not everybody can go on an eco adventure like Rob.

But still, there are plenty of p in our community where you can g of the great outdoors and we fea a lot of them on this program.

Still, we like to give them a little special twist.

In fact, for this next story, we took a drone out to McClay Ga to see a bird's eye view of that Our ecology producer, Rob Diaz de Vegas, is one of many pe at WFMU focusing on a special pr called Not So Black and White, which focuses on the history of in our community and its impact Today, Rob's episode, it's going to be focusing on agricult and land use issues involving ra Here's a preview of the full ser You know, it's not just a garden where they gro It's a place of peace.

You know, where some of us you k who are addicts, homeless, we could come here and think, smell fresh flowers, vegetables, and just sit down and just just about, you know, just have peace Get away from the world, everybo The garden is more than a garden You can listen to the first epis through WFMU dot org or through your favorite podcast app.

Later this month, we'll be holdi a special discussion and screening of the video portion of this pro Go to WFMU dot org for more deta Here's what we're working on for next week's episode of Local To the uninitiated, it looks a b like a shark frenzy with people.

These people are members of the Tallahassee Tarpon Underwater Ru I'm a very competitive person, so the fact that we can fight fo and you know, I like the fight, the competitiveness.

I really like it.

I enjoy.

It.

That's it for this episode of Lo I'm Suzanne Smith.

You can see these stories and mo website, WFMU dot org slash loca And while you're online, follow us on Facebook and Instag Plus, don't forget to sign up for our Community Calendar newsl delivered weekly to your email.

It is a great way to stay on top happening in-person and in the virtual world for everyone at WFIU Public Medi Have a great week, everyone.

Bye Magnolia Trees greet the southern breeze in the land where the rivers wind.

Seeds that spring up from the past leave us treasures yet to find.

Where our children play along the land our fathers built with honest hands.

Take a moment now, we have found.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.