2024
The Wild Green Minute
Together with WKGC-FM Panama City, Wild Green Future has produced the Wild Green Minute, a short fact file segment exploring Florida's wildlife and wild places.
Access to Nature in the Florida Panhandle
Bay County Conservancy is a land trust dedicated to the preservation of environmentally sensitive lands in Northwest Florida.
Wild Green Future has provided Bay County Conservancy with funding to help enhance the trail networks, signage, and wildlife habitats of the King Family and Juniper Headwaters preserves.
Access to nature is essential for human well-being and environmental education. By supporting these trail upgrades, we hope to help the people of Bay County enjoy and protect their incredible natural resources.
Learn more about the Bay County Conservancy on their website, linked here!
Staffing Conservation in the Amazon
Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon (ASA)'s mission is to conserve the biodiversity and natural resources of the Peruvian Amazon for the benefit of all those who live in and depend on the rainforest. Based in Madre de Dios, they work by combining research and education with community-based conservation, acting as a resource to their neighbors across the region.
Good work takes people power. Wild Green Future provided a grant to support ASA's Lepidoptera Project Manager, Lepidoptera Project Lead Assistant, and Lead Resident Naturalist positions.
Learn more about the Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon on their website, linked here.
Conserving an Imperiled Butterfly
The frosted elfin is small brown butterfly that is declining throughout its geographic range. It occurs in small, localized populations, and its caterpillars specialize in sundial lupine and wild indigo. Extremely vulnerable to habitat destruction and fragmentation, frosted elfin populations have been lost from 7 of the 10 locations in Florida where they were present just since 2017.
Due to the species' decline and difficulty dispersing between potential habitats, a strong captive breeding program is needed. The Daniels Lab at the Florida Museum of Natural History's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity has over 30 years' experience in captive breeding of at-risk taxa, including the Miami blue butterfly and Schaus's swallowtail.
Wild Green Future provided a grant which allowed them to augment their captive colony of frosted elfin butterflies with new individuals and diverse DNA, as well as to create a comprehensive set of husbandry and breeding best practices for conservationists across the butterfly's range.
Learn more about the work being done by the Daniels Lab on their website, linked here!
A Vehicle for Conservation
Ashton Biological Preserve is a land and tortoise conservation organization in central Florida. The lands they work on support a number of rare and endangered herpetofauna species, including a healthy population of gopher tortoises, a keystone species in the southeastern US. They also have an active education component to their work, teaching thousands of children in classrooms about the wildlife of their region every year.
Wild Green Future provided a grant for the purchase of an upgraded preserve truck, helping to facilitate their management and outreach work.
Read more about Ashton Biological Preserve's work at their website, linked here.
Sustaining the Brazil Nut Corridor
Most of the world's Brazil nut supply comes from Madre de Dios, where a belt of designated concessions are stewarded by harvesters known as concessionaires. Brazil nut trees’ life cycle requires intact tropical rainforest, so as long as the harvest is sufficient these concessions will continue to support a wildlife corridor the size of Connecticut.
Our partner, Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon, works to assist Brazil nut concessionaires in maintaining the productivity of their forests by holding workshops on Brazil nut cultivation and raising seedlings to be planted in forest gaps.
Sustained funding is vital for the success of conservation projects. Wild Green Future was proud to fund this work for a fourth year.
Funding for this project in 2024 was generously provided by a donation from Angry Birds.
Motors for Watershed Advocacy and Conservation
WWALS Watershed Coalition, Inc. (WWALS, also known as Suwannee Riverkeeper) works to promote clean, swimmable, fishable, and drinkable waters in the Suwannee River Basin and Estuary, which stretches over 10,000 square miles from the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia through Florida to the Gulf of Mexico. Their activities range from public education to advocacy, water quality monitoring, and the literal heavy lifting of ensuring public access to the watershed’s creeks and rivers by keeping them clean and clear of tree blockages.
Wild Green Future funded the purchase of two outboard motors, enabling the use of two vessels which WWALS already owned that were in good condition but lacked a means of propulsion, a trolling motor for auxiliary propulsion, and a chainsaw to help with their access work. We also funded the purchase of three prop guards to protect manatees and other wildlife from potential collisions.
As a thank you to the Wild Green Future donors who made these purchases possible, WWALS named one of their boats the Four Good Caws.
You can learn more about WWALS and their work by visiting their website, linked here.
Expanding Conservation Infrastructure
Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon (ASA)'s mission is to conserve the biodiversity and natural resources of the Peruvian Amazon for the benefit of all those who live in and depend on the rainforest. Based in Madre de Dios, they work by combining research and education with community-based conservation, acting as a resource to their neighbors across the region.
ASA's field station, Finca las Piedras, required infrastructural expansions to support greater conservation and research efforts. Wild Green Future provided a grant for the construction of new staff housing, the installation and maintenance of screens and roofing on existing buildings, the addition of new furniture, and maintenance on existing furniture like dining hall tables. This enabled the station to support more students and personnel.
It can be easier to fundraise for certain tasks, like planting trees and conserving charismatic animals, but organizations are often more limited by less exciting factors. Despite their crucial role, these everyday concerns can be much more difficult to find funding for. This mismatch provides Wild Green Future with an opportunity: by funding infrastructure costs, we are able to help expand our partners' operational capacity, leading to much more benefit per dollar spent than might otherwise be obtainable.
Learn more about the Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon on their website, linked here.
Planting for Backyard Pollinators
Habitat loss is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity, and urbanized areas present a huge opportunity to increase connectivity and habitat coverage that wildlife would otherwise lack. Access to nature is also important to humans, most of whom globally now live in cities and suburbs.
Wild Green Future gave the Daniels Lab at the Florida Museum of Natural History's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity a grant to enable the purchase and free distribution of over a thousand native pollinator plants to people in north central Florida.
The Daniels lab will also gave a small reward to any recipients who send in a photograph of their plant, well, planted in their yards!
Learn more about the work being done by the Daniels Lab on their website, linked here.
2023
Helping Save the Mountain Chicken Frog
WildDominique was founded by local ecologists, agriculturalists, marine biologists, and environmental enthusiasts to support and promote sound conservation practices in Dominica through environmental education, community engagement, research, species preservation, and policy.
Wild Green Future partnered with WildDominique and the Zoological Society of London to support their work to conserve one of the most endangered frogs on Earth, the mountain chicken (Leptodactylus fallax).
The mountain chicken is a large frog which was once common across several islands in the Caribbean, but has faced severe declines after its populations were infected by chytrid fungus, a deadly disease that has wiped out frog species around the globe.
Dominica is home to the last fully wild population of mountain chickens. The island's frogs may have some level of resistance to the disease, adding to the importance of this small population.
Wild Green Future has provided a grant to support WildDominique's work with local farmers, whose lands the remaining frogs reside on, to assist with productive, frog-friendly farming practices.
Special thanks to Angry Birds for their generous donation in support of this grant!
Learn more about WildDominique on their website, linked here.
Sustaining the Brazil Nut Corridor
Most of the world's Brazil nut supply comes from Madre de Dios, where a belt of designated concessions are stewarded by harvesters known as concessionaires. Brazil nut trees’ life cycle requires intact tropical rainforest, so as long as the harvest is sufficient these concessions will continue to support a wildlife corridor the size of Connecticut.
Our partner, Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon, works to assist Brazil nut concessionaires in maintaining the productivity of their forests by holding workshops on Brazil nut cultivation and raising seedlings to be planted in forest gaps.
Sustained funding is vital for the success of conservation projects. Wild Green Future was proud to fund this work for a third year.
Learn more about this project and Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon on their website, linked here.