Water you talking about?
Jack and Rose might disagree about its recreational value, but this temperature of water can hold more dissolved oxygen.
What is cold water?
I’m a freshwater crustacean with claws, I hide under rocks, and I look suspiciously like a tiny lobster.
What is a crawfish?
Florida has more than 1,000 recognized examples of these places where groundwater naturally makes its grand entrance at the surface.
What are springs? FDEP estimates Florida has more than 1,000.
The USDA texture triangle is basically the world’s nerdiest love triangle, involving these three soil separates.
What are sand, silt, and clay?
Hopefully everyone at this meeting gets this one: SWES stands for this.
What is Soil, Water, & Ecosystem Sciences?
Your field meter reads pH 6 instead of pH 7. That means the hydrogen-ion concentration is this many times greater.
What is 10 times?
I’m a bottom-dwelling mollusk sometimes called one of the “livers of our rivers” because I filter particles from the water.
What is freshwater mussels?
Underlying all of Florida and parts of several neighboring states, this ~100,000-square-mile aquifer system is one of the most productive in the world.
What is the Floridan Aquifer System?
Anakin Skywalker famously hates this largest of the three soil separates because “it’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.”
What is sand?
Not a file format or a cardiologist’s concern: in environmental management, BMP stands for this.
What is Best Management Practices?
Sunlight supplies the energy, but this force is responsible for precipitation falling and much of water's downhill movement across Earth's surface.
What is gravity?
This semi-aquatic mammal is famous for building dams that can dramatically alter stream and wetland hydrology.
What is a beaver?
Only Florida would choose a sand as its official soil. This fine sand has held the title since 1989.
What is Myakka fine sand?
EPA’s TMDL: because apparently “how much pollution is too much pollution?” needed a four-letter acronym.
What is total maximum daily load?
If you work in Florida agriculture, water conservation, pesticides, or BMPs, you’ll probably run into FDACS eventually. What does FDACS stand for?
What is the Florida Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services?
Lake scientists give this name to the zone where temperature changes most rapidly with depth.
What is thermocline?
This invasive Florida reptile has become notorious for eating native wildlife in the Everglades.
What is a burmese python?
This author gave us the “River of Grass,” her famous name for the Everglades.
Who is Marjory Stoneman Douglas? She used the phrase in 1947 to describe the Everglades’ shallow sheetflow through sawgrass marshes.
Drain an organic soil for agriculture and expose it to oxygen, and the soil surface can literally shrink over time as organic matter decomposes. What is this loss of soil elevation called?
What is subsidence?
No tactical vest required: SWAT is a watershed model built to predict how management affects water, sediment, and agricultural chemicals. What does SWAT stand for?
Freshwater breaks the usual “colder = denser” rule. At approximately this temperature it reaches maximum density.
What is 4°C?
American alligator moms can’t choose this for their babies, but nest temperature can: eggs incubated around 34°C or warmer produce this.
What are males?
Springs have rankings too. To earn first-magnitude status, a Florida spring must average at least this discharge in cubic feet per second.
What is 100 cubic feet per second?
You dig a Florida soil pit and hit a dark subsurface horizon labeled Bhs. In USDA horizon notation, what do the lowercase h and s tell you has accumulated there?
What are organic matter (h) and aluminum/iron (s)?
Protecting a spring or river from being pumped dry comes with its own acronym. What do MFLs stand for?
What are Minimum Flows and Levels?