Efforts to create a corridor for Florida's wildlife got a big boost on Wednesday.
The $1 million grant to the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation came during the Corridor Connect Conference, held this week at Disney's Coronado Springs resort.
It will be used to help complete what is planned to be an interconnected network of natural habitat across nearly 18 million acres of the state. The gift will be used to help close bottlenecks between preserved areas in the wildlife corridor, which can be among the most difficult parcels of land to acquire.
Zak Gezon is the conservation director with Disney Conservation. He's also a board member with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation and spoke at the Corridor Connect Summit.
Gezon said the money should be used for a couple of purposes.
"One is going to be used to expand the 'Mind the Gaps' workshops, and that is an effort to get into local areas with the local stakeholders, pour over maps and identify the pinch points in the corridor and talk with the people with the local knowledge to figure out, hey, how do we solve this particular bottleneck right here," he said.
The aim of the corridor is to connect preserved natural areas so that wildlife can freely migrate and not become inbred from being isolated from other populations.
"There's a wonderful effort to protect areas, and you end up with a series of biological islands, and that's just not as valuable because there's no gene flow among them and wildlife isn't able to migrate through it," Gezon said. "So what we need to do is connect all of those dots."
He said the grant will also be used to create trailheads to get people into nature, so they can take advantage of the wildlife corridor.
Claire Martin is a senior manager for Disney's Nature Strategy & Integration. The company's biodiversity conservation effort turned 30 this year.
"What we really love is that the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation and this initiative takes it to the next level and really thinks about the entire ecosystem across the state of Florida," she said at the conference, "And how it benefits all those species and how it benefits all of us."
About half the land targeted for the corridor has been preserved through purchase or conservation easements, which pay ranchers and farmers not to develop their land.
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