Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve

MaVynee "Beach Lady" Betsch

The National Park Service congratulates the regional recipients of the 2023 Excellence in Volunteerism Awards. These nominees embody the values of service, engagement, and stewardship fundamental to our national parks.

View the recipients of the 2025 National Park Service Excellence in Interpretation Awards, which recognize outstanding contributions to the practice of interpretation and education by NPS employees.

We're restoring shoreline at 3 parks with Pervious Oyster Shell Habitat (POSH) modules created from oysters recycled from restaurants. These will serve as the base of new oyster beds that will fight erosion from boat wakes.

Across the US, changes in water availability are altering which plants grow where. These changes are evident at a broad scale. But not all areas experience the same climate in the same way, even within the boundaries of a single national park. A new dataset gives park managers a valuable tool for understanding why vegetation has changed and how it might change in the future under different climate-change scenarios.

What does climate change mean for Timucuan Preserve? Learn about the specific changes, challenges, and opportunities for action in the park.

The diverse and often complex histories of Kingsley Plantation, located on Fort George Island in Florida, are reflected in its cultural landscape. The various structures, their use, and the spatial arrangement of the landscape illustrate historic boundaries of access, ownership, and power. Today, the NPS maintains and interprets these landscape features to open complex histories to interpretation.

Read the abstract and get the link to a published paper on how dragonfly mercury studies uncover unexpected atmospheric delivery pathways: Janssen, S.E., C.J. Kotalik, J.J. Willacker, M.T. Tate, C. Flanagan Pritz, S.J. Nelson, D.P. Krabbenhoft, D. Walters, and C. Eagles-Smith. 2024. Geographic Drivers of Mercury Entry into Aquatic Foods Webs Revealed by Mercury Stable Isotopes in Dragonfly Larvae. Environmental Science & Technology. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.4c02436

In FY’21, Timucuan National Preserve had success when a wildfire burned up to a preexisting fuels treatment, reducing impacts from suppression activities and reducing the need for suppression repair. An afternoon thunderstorm in June 2021 ignited the Red Trail fire at TIMU. The fire was contained on two sides by a fuels treatment that had been put in place by the Atlantic Zone Fire Management Office, leading to little need for suppression actions by firefighting resources.