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Where does rain go after it falls?

Florida's native green anole (pronounced "uh-nole"), Anolis carolinensis, is Lara's favorite species in all of Florida! In this episode of Naturally Florida, we'll be chatting about what makes the green anole so special and about their nonnative look-alike, the brown anole (Anolis sagrei).

Episode Transcript:

SHANNON:

Welcome to “Naturally Florida.” Thanks so much for joining us today. On today's episode we'll be talking all about rain and what happens to it after it hits the ground. So thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoy the episode.

LARA:
Welcome to “Naturally Florida,” a podcast about Florida's natural areas and the wild things that live here. I'm Lara Milligan.

SHANNON:
And I'm Shannon Carnevale.

LARA:
This podcast is brought to you by UF/ IFAS Extension in Polk and Pinellas Counties.

Okay, so Shannon, in elementary school, right, we all learn about this idea of the water cycle and water flows in this nice circle. But for the majority of us, we don't really ever think about where that water goes when it rains in like our local towns and cities where there's development, right? That water cycle is more like this perfect picture in a natural setting.

SHANNON:
Because on that chart it goes to a river, but I don't have a river right next to my house.

LARA:
Mountains in the background, and yeah, all the things. (LAUGHTER) Yeah. So I was thinking today we could talk about that. Where does that rain water go? And how has urbanization in Florida kind of changed to what we might call like the “urban water cycle”?

SHANNON:
In general, I feel like people don't really know what happens to water after it falls from the sky in Florida.

LARA:
Right. Where does that water go? So that's kind of what we want to talk about today. And we will probably be referring to this from here on out as “stormwater.” So if you hear Shannon and I talking about the water, that's kind of like running off as it hits the ground, we might be saying “stormwater."

Just to give our listeners a little inside scoop there… But before we get into that, Shannon, let's back up real quick and talk about rainfall in general in Florida because we get a lot.

SHANNON:
So much.

LARA:
Yeah. I mean, I've seen different numbers anywhere from like 55 to 60 inches a year. Obviously, depending where you are in the state. And I think what's important for people to know, especially if they're not from Florida, is the majority of that rain comes during our hotter summer months, a little bit into the fall, but it's not really year round.

We have what we call our wet season and our dry season.

SHANNON:
Yes, we don't have even rainfall year round. And part of that has to do with hurricane season. So if we get a tropical storm or a hurricane, or worst case scenario all of the above multiple times, we get a lot of rain.

LARA:
For sure. Yeah. I remember one tropical storm, we got over 26 inches at the preserve where I'm located, in one month.

SHANNON:
So that brings up the question “Where does all that rain go after it falls, especially when we get so much of it at one time?”

LARA:
Yeah. And it’s, again, easy thinking back to that water cycle we learned in school, right? Of course, well it just falls along the mountain and goes to this nice little river. But in Florida, it's not as easy to see or know where that water does go.

Yeah. And so I kind of wanted to tell our listeners a little bit about this concept or idea of “watershed.” We might throw this terminology around here and there, but it's a really important term and concept.

SHANNON:
It's a bit abstract, but it really is at its core fairly simple to understand.

LARA:
Yeah. So there's a really basic one our county uses, which is just “an area of land that drains to an open body of water.”

SHANNON:
I like it.

LARA:
Yeah, yeah. Very straightforward. And I think the concept that's important for our listeners is that no matter where you live, we all live in a watershed. So no matter, right, you’re urban, suburban, our water that hits our property is ultimately going somewhere, whether it infiltrates into the ground or runs off as stormwater to some nearby body of water.

SHANNON:
Yes, anywhere your feet are touching the ground or water you're in a watershed, or several, depending on the scale you're looking at.

LARA:
Yeah. Yeah. And that is a good point. There's different scales of watersheds, which we won't get into today. (LAUGHTER) So kind of thinking about, again, where our water goes so we can figure out which watershed we live in, right? So like I live in the Bishop Creek watershed, so the water, you know, ultimately flows to Bishop Creek, which in my case goes to Upper Tampa Bay.

So I think for me it's it's kind of building that local connection and understanding, like what I do on my property can ultimately impact the bay. And, you know, that's the same no matter where you live, obviously, different water bodies.

SHANNON:
Yeah, I'm in the Peace Creek watershed, which eventually drains to the Peace River, which then drains to Charlotte Harbor, which then goes into the Gulf. So anything I do on my property will affect all those places in between and ultimately our Gulf of Mexico.

LARA:
Yeah. And your county in particular, too, is a critical piece of property.

SHANNON:
We are the headwaters of seven different major watersheds in the state. All of our water leaves. So when I like to tell residents when rain falls here, it's leaving. So we need to try and keep as much of it as we can in our county through that percolation, which, in other words, is just letting the rain seep into the ground to refill our aquifer where we get our drinking water.

LARA:
Yeah, we would love to have water seep into the ground here in Pinellas County, Shannon. (LAUGHTER) But unfortunately, this concept of development has really taken off in our county. There's lots of concrete where there used to be, right, these open pastures and green space or forested lands right now.

SHANNON:
It's because you guys are pretty built out, right?

LARA:
Yeah. We're the most urban, densely populated county in the state, so…

SHANNON:
Wow.

LARA:
So, yeah, we have a lot of that water now to deal with. And again, like, where does that water go? That's something that our land managers and water resource managers have to figure out. Where's all this water going to go once it hits the ground?

SHANNON:
That's such a good point, Lara. All that water has to go somewhere. Over where I'm located, most of our rainwater that doesn't percolate into the ground, or doesn't soak into the ground, it winds up in a storm drain. And that storm drain connects to a series of pipes all over the city and county. And they typically drain to the local lakes.

Whichever lake is closest to you is most likely where your stormwater is going. But where does that water go in Pinellas County?

LARA:
Yeah, that's a good question. Probably what most people would say is it goes to the lake in their backyard. But what a lot of people don't realize is that is actually called a “stormwater pond” because that is holding and retaining all the stormwater. So because they're so developed, developers have to create these little ditches to collect that rainwater. And so, yeah, we have a lot of stormwater ponds in my county.

SHANNON:
And they're yeah, they're a good thing. They do, they catch all that rainwater, which collects a lot of things along its way. We'll talk about that in a minute. But it also creates a lovely environment for people to live in. They like living on the waterfront.

But, Lara, much like our lakes, a lot of people don't realize that the water that winds up in stormwater ponds is not treated. It's not filtered before it gets there. Is that right in your area?

LARA:
Yeah, Shannon. I think that's a really good point to emphasize that stormwater is not treated. That's the same in Pinellas County. I think pretty much anywhere in the state, stormwater doesn't go through any formal treatment process, which, you know…

SHANNON:
Before that endpoint, which is important.

LARA:
Yes. For these, in our case, stormwater ponds, for you lakes. Yeah. It looks different depending on where you are. And so there's consequences with the fact that it's not treated. There's many aspects of stormwater that create issues for us to to manage and deal with as it relates to stormwater and water quality and water quantity.

SHANNON:
Yeah, absolutely. People in my area are very shocked to find out that the water that drains to our lakes is not treated in any way. So that's why I like to draw a lot of attention to storm drains, right? So the storm drains are those big drains in the street or in the curb, or you might see a large grate in your swale.

And those drains they go directly to our lakes in Polk County, in most of Polk County. And it's important that residents know that because it's not somewhere where you should be dumping things like soapy water from washing your car or old paint or, gosh, oil. I mean, anything you put in those drains, it's going to our lake.

LARA:
Yeah. And even if you don't put it directly in the drain, right, it can make its way there through, you know, as rainwater flows across the surfaces, it'll pick these things up. And that's in our county in particular, because we have so many people in such a small area and a lot of people have dogs.

It sounds silly when we say like it's really important that you pick up after your pet. A lot of people think that dog poop is fertilizer, which it would make sense, like that I would see thinking that before you become educated and understand like that is not really the case. It's actually a significant source of nutrients that can cause harm.

Like to the point it's natural. It doesn't belong there. So we stress that a lot in our county. Yeah, go ahead.

SHANNON:
I'm sorry. I was just going to say we do too. And in our area, because we have so much rural area and so many areas, thankfully, that are still not developed we have a lot of wildlife, too. And the question I get asked right after “Please pick up after your dog” is “But the wildlife poop happens, like we're not cleaning that up..”

And you're absolutely right. We're totally not cleaning that up. But to your point, which is density, there's so many more dogs in Pinellas County than there would be naturally.

LARA:
Right.

SHANNON:
And we're feeding our animals artificial diets most of the time. So they're much higher protein than would be there in the system naturally, plus parasites and other things that are just icky. So we want to make sure that that does not wind up in our lakes, rivers, creeks or, in your case, in the Tampa Bay.

LARA:
Yeah. And I think there's a lot of other activities and things that people do where we're adding nutrients to the system, and we don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, but…

SHANNON:
Because it sounds natural. “It’s just a leaf blade. What could it hurt?”

LARA:
Yeah. And so it's just, again, we're putting things into the water that wouldn't normally be there. And then, of course, right, most of us are probably fertilizing our grass as well. So there's more nutrients. There's just a lot of little things that homeowners and residents and visitors can do to help, I guess, lessen their contribution to pollution of stormwater.

SHANNON:
Yes. Pollution doesn't always mean chemical contaminants. It doesn't always mean industrial waste. The reason we have to cut our grass so often is because we have fed it so well that it grows too much. Then we have to cut it. And those grass clippings recontribute all of those chemical nutrients in the natural sense back to the water. And that's problematic.

LARA:
Yeah. And there's several other issues I just wanted to highlight as it relates to stormwater, just to stress like why we're even having this episode. And of course, we're going to end with things that you guys can do, which we've talked about a little bit already.

But Shannon mentioned earlier in the episode just about like the rate or speed in which water can flow across the land when we are developing these areas. And that can lead to things like erosion. And I'm sure, Shannon, you've seen that with all of your lakes that you have in your county.

SHANNON:
Yes. Yes. Erosion at the end of stormwater pipes is a big issue. And a lot of municipalities try to plant trees at the end of the stormwater pipe. It’s a delicate balance. You need the trees far enough away that they're not going to break the pipe, but close enough that they can help hold some of that soil in place.

When we get a big rainfall, because it's not all, like Lara said, we don't get even amounts of rain throughout the year, we get big rainstorms and those rainstorms are getting bigger and less frequent. So we have something that we call in the business “the first flush.”

LARA:
Not your toilet.

SHANNON:
Not your toilet. The first flush is that first inch of rain. And the reason that's so important is it collects all of those things that have sat on your roofs, hung out on the street, been on the sidewalk. When you get that first inch of rain, water creates a flush of water that goes shooting into the stormwater pipes and carries with it all that pollution.

LARA:
Yeah. And part of that, too, a lot of people don't think about like sediments or dirt and soil that that water picks up along the way as being like a potential water quality issue. But do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about why this idea of sediments flushing into the water system could be a threat?

SHANNON:
Yeah, so the sediment just carries a lot of things with it. If you think about your average road, what happens on it, Lara, people drive.

LARA:
Yeah.

SHANNON:
And the more people drive, the more people brake. And when you brake your brakes contribute brake dust. Brake dust winds up on the street. These can bring heavy metals into our lakes, which can contaminate the food web. You can also talk about just on the very simple level, “turbidity,” which is just a fancy term for stirring dirt up in the water. So that causes a lot of problems for our aquatic plants when they can't get sunlight.

LARA:
Yeah, for sure. And I was hoping you'd make that connection with this idea of turbidity. Like when the water gets murky, right, it prevents the sunlight from reaching those aquatic plants.

SHANNON:
Those aquatic plants are so important to our lake health. So when we talk about stormwater, I am always talking about lake health. And that's the connection that I can usually make with our residents, is we want our lakes to be healthy, just like we want Tampa Bay to be healthy. We want it to be pretty. We want to go do outdoor activities there.

We want our property values to stay nice because we don't have algae blooms, those sorts of things all tie back to stormwater, which is crazy when you think about the impact of the question “Where does the rain go?” Like it's all tied together.

LARA:
There's just so many aspects to stormwater and we definitely don't have time to touch on all of the water quality issues as it relates to stormwater today. But we do want to transition again into some things that you guys can do to help prevent stormwater pollution and just help, I guess, really prevent stormwater from entering our storm drains to begin with.

SHANNON:
Yeah, and Lara, I would say there's two categories we can talk about with what people can do to help prevent negative impacts based on stormwater The first would be preventing those contaminants. So going back to the grass clippings, keep those on your grass. Bag your oak leaves. Again, oak leaves oh, but those are natural. They're not natural and the quantity that we're putting down on the roads or in the speed that they get to the water body. So again, collecting those pollutants that might contaminate our stormwater. And then would you like to start talking about category two, which is controlling your actual stormwater?

LARA:
Yeah. And there's a lot of super easy things we can do and also a little bit more complicated things we can do. But something very basic that we can all do if you have a rain gutter on your home is just to direct that water to flow into your yard.

Yeah. I was teaching one of my water classes and we did a walk through this neighborhood and the majority of the pipes are just pointed straight down the driveway, which, you know, I guess makes sense. Get the water off my property. But as it relates to stormwater, that is definitely what we do not want to do.

SHANNON:
Right. I would agree with that. So if you have gutters, just point it to a green area in your yard. All you're doing is slowing it down. And you can think of that as making it a more natural process. Let the water soak into the ground.

LARA:
And one of the other things you can do to expand on that, Shannon mentioned, if you have a part of your yard where water does tend to collect, you could consider installing something called a rain garden, which again, we won't go into details today because that would be like five episodes to talk about. But we will definitely have links in the show notes if you want to explore that more.

Do you want to give our listeners a quick little summary of what a rain garden even is for folks that might be like “What are they talking about?!”

SHANNON:
Yes, that's a great point. So a rain garden is an intentional area of your yard to collect the water and let it seep in.

LARA:
Yeah. And so I think kind of big picture, what a take-home message as it relates to stormwater is, Shannon was telling me earlier she was, like, don't let your runoff run off. (LAUGHTER) Like we want to capture the water the best that we can that lands on your property to stay on your property would be kind of a big picture goal of what we'd want you guys to do.

SHANNON:
So far, we've primarily focused on people that have yards, things that people can do with their gutters or their landscaping to really help with this problem. But, Lara, a lot of people in Pinellas and other urban areas of Florida live in apartments or condos. Do you have any ideas or recommendations for what people in that living situation could do to help our water quality?

LARA:
Yeah, there's a couple of options. I mean, one kind of simple one is for car washing your car, right? We suggest going to a commercial car wash because they are actually regulated in that water has to be directed to, you know, and treated and all the things appropriately before it can just run across the land and end up in our local water bodies.

SHANNON:
So contrary to everything we've said so far, the water that falls on the ground in a commercial car wash does get treated.

LARA:
Yeah, Shannon, that water gets treated just the same as water that leaves your home when you flush the toilet or take a shower or run the dishwasher. So, yes, it does get treated. Other things that people can do who live in like multifamily housing is you can team up with your neighbors, you know, encourage something we call “Florida Friendly Landscaping,” which maybe, Shannon, you can touch briefly on that.

You know, if you have an opportunity to do a rain garden in your apartment complex, you can work together on that. I've even seen people like flagging dog poop that's left all over the apartment property just to raise awareness on that. Like “Pick up after your pet!”

SHANNON:
Ooh, public shaming.

LARA:
I know, (LAUGHTER) I know lots of options. But did you want to just briefly touch on “Florida Friendly Landscaping?”

SHANNON:
Sure. “Florida Friendly Landscaping” is a wonderful program through the University of Florida's IFAS Extension, and it primarily focuses on picking the right plant for the right place. So these are either Florida natives or non-native species of plants that don't require a lot of fertilization. They don't require a lot of irrigation or sprinklers, and that helps reduce the impact to our stormwater.

But furthermore, there's a section in “Florida Friendly Landscaping” about protecting the waterfront, and it has to do with making sure that excess nutrients and grass clippings aren't making it to our waterways.

LARA:
Yeah, that's great. Shannon, is there anything else that we could tell our listeners they could do to help with potential issues from stormwater?

SHANNON:
Honestly, I think your great first step is just figuring out what watershed you live in and take a field trip to it. Go hang out near that water body and appreciate how cool water resources are in Florida.

LARA:
Yeah, Shannon. And I think that's a great way to wrap up this episode on stormwater. And thank you guys so much for tuning in and listening to today's episode.

SHANNON:
Thanks for listening to “Naturally Florida," a podcast about Florida's natural areas and the wild things that live here. Stay updated on new episodes by subscribing on your favorite podcast platform. If you enjoyed today's episode, consider sharing it with a friend. “Naturally Florida” is produced by your hosts Shannon Carnevale.

LARA:
And Lara Milligan.

SHANNON:
If you have questions or suggestions, submit them online at naturallyfloridapodcast.com. This podcast is brought to you by the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension, an Equal Opportunity Institution. Thank you for listening.

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