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The group spearheading the Florida Wildlife Corridor gets a $1 million boost

At dawn, a panther is seen crossing a path in the midst of an area with tall pine trees.
AP
/
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
This 2017 image from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service motion-activated camera shows a Florida panther at Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. Panthers are hemmed into far southern Florida by development and would be able to migrate through a wildlife corridor.

Disney World's conservation arm has given $1 million to the foundation that wants to preserve a wildlife corridor through the length of Florida.

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.

Three people gather around Mickey Mouse and a ceremonial check
Courtesy Disney World
Claire Martin, left, and Zak Gezon, right, gather around Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation CEO Mallory Lykes Dimmitt and Mickey Mouse at the Corridor Connect conference in Orlando.

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.

Map of the Florida Wildlife Corridor
A. Meeks, Archbold Biological Station
This map of the Florida Wildlife Corridor includes potential sites for acquisition.

Steve Newborn is a WUSF reporter and producer at WUSF covering environmental issues and politics in the Tampa Bay area.
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