Mission

Environmental Mission

The Florida Paddling Trails Association is committed to protecting the environment along all water trails. We will do this by:

  1. Environmental Education
  2. Through a grant by the Elizabeth Ordwell Dunn Foundation, we have created an environmental education program called, "Paddler's Environmental Toolkit Training". This teaches paddlers to identify environmental & wildlife problems, to solve the small problems and report the large ones. Click here to learn more. If you would like to take the class, contact your Regional Director to learn where and when classes are scheduled in your area.
  3. Monitoring & Cleanup
    1. Local Waterway Cleanups: We work with many different government and volunteer agencies to do cleanups on local waterways.
    2. Ocean Conservancy Partnership: We work with Ocean Conservancy on their annual Coastal Cleanup Program.
    3. N.O.A.A. Plankton Monitoring: We have partnered with N.O.A.A. on their plankton monitoring program. Volunteers will be trained by the N.O.A.A. These volunteers will be capable of taking water samples every two weeks, identifying plankton (including Red Tide) using a microscope and reporting the results to the N.O.A.A. via email. N.O.A.A. uses this information to plot and report a plankton map along Florida's coast.

Three Feet Above Sea Level:

A special program has been created to give the paddler special insight to the way our environment looks from the view of a paddler. View this program here.