eNews
Summer/Fall 2021 | Vol 14 | No 2
A Unique Way to Help You Discover the Aucilla Watershed
I’d venture a guess that almost every person reading this enjoys spending time outdoors. You probably have a property, a lake, a river, or a campsite that feels familiar and comfortable. It’s likely a place where some of your best outdoor memories occurred. But what about when you feel like exploring someplace new? How do you decide where to go?

Events, such as this Flint River Grotto paddling trip, help to expose new people to the beauty of the Aucilla. Photo by Doug Alderson.
Finding new places and deciphering the various websites that outline how to experience them can be daunting, even when those places are in your neck of the woods. This drove Tall Timbers staff to develop a tool to help people like you discover opportunities within a region that abounds with outdoor activities: The Aucilla River Watershed.
The tool, called a storymap, integrates maps with descriptions and photos to function as an online guide to a given topic. In this case, you can scroll through a tour of the watershed or simply click on the outdoor activity that you are most interested in doing. The maps are activity specific to help you easily figure out how to get from your house to some of the best spots in the Aucilla watershed.

The storymap allows maps and text to flow together, as you can see here in the scenic driving section.
The storymap represents one of many productive collaborations between the Tall Timbers Land Conservancy and the Tall Timbers Geospatial Lab. These kinds of partnerships, in whatever form they take, are almost always of value since they bring people with different ways of approaching problems together. The result is usually something that would not have happened had one group tried to work on the project independently. Whether it’s outreach or conservation, there really is power in partnership.
Those familiar with the Aucilla watershed already know that it’s a paradise in terms of its beauty and the number of ways one can connect with its unparalleled resources. We hope that this storymap helps more people discover the watershed. Through this discovery, we hope that appreciation follows. It’s this appreciation which will result in support for the long-term conservation of the Aucilla and its watershed. For an area this special, it’s important to bring more people into the fold. I sincerely hope that you enjoy the storymap and, more importantly, that you fall in love with some of the places that it features.
For more information about the Aucilla watershed and the efforts of Tall Timbers to conserve it, visit this link.