2026 LEEF Conference Wakulla Wild

The Sustainability Fellows program provides an opportunity for students of any discipline to participate in furthering sustainability efforts on the FSU campus and in the Tallahassee community. Sustainability Fellows can be selected from any major or field of study. Fellows work in collaboration with campus and community partners to actively engage in research, propose strategies, and identify opportunities for sustainability issues.

Have you ever wondered where the sand on the beaches in Florida originates? Why are there rolling hills between Tampa and Orlando? What is the reason shark teeth occur in rocks far from coastlines? Florida’s geologic history provides answers. Connect with geologists and educators at the Florida Geological Survey (FGS) to learn about Florida’s geology, explore the work that the FGS does and discover resources we provide to educators, including 3D scans of Florida fossils and virtual museum tours.

Environmental educators often rely on grants to fund their work. The logic model is a foundational tool that not only strengthens grant proposals but also is fundamental to program planning, implementation and evaluation. This workshop will use the collaborative, inclusive power of liberating structures with the rigor of the logic model approach to co-create and teach environmental educators how to write an effective grant proposal. This will be a hands-on, highly interactive format designed to move participants from abstract ideas to concrete, fundable project plans.

This session highlights a University of Florida Extension project that integrates the Community Action Project for the Environment (CAPE) framework with youth from Scouting America, Girl Scouts of the USA, and other groups. Parents and troop leaders are equipped to guide youth through multi-month, community-based environmental action projects. Evaluation results demonstrate growth in youth scientific literacy, skills, and efficacy, illustrating how CAPE empowers meaningful, long-term environmental action.

This presentation will explain how the FSU Wakulla Springs Lab connects students, scientists, and media experts to produce educational materials, tours, and presentations about Wakulla Springs, an International Geological Heritage Site in Wakulla County, Florida. The presentation will also provide useful tips for enlisting college students to help build effective environmental communication materials.

Environmental education faces critical challenges in keeping pace with rapidly evolving technological landscapes. AI offers support in planning, content creation, evaluation, and teaching, creating opportunities for innovative and timely content to engage students. This session introduces ways environmental educators can integrate AI into their practice through hands-on activities with various AI tools, while addressing ethical considerations. Participants will gain practical skills to critically apply AI for lesson planning, content development, assessment, and instruction, fostering innovation in the field of environmental education.

We will teach about the marine specimens that we supply to universities and how they can be used as teaching tools in educating children about marine science, embryology, cellular reaggregation, and different phyla of organisms.

This presentation will discuss the use of digital technologies at the University of South Florida Libraries to transform archives from the Florida Environment and Natural History (FLENH) collections into openly accessible resources for educational purposes. The presentation will highlight an approach to digital curation that centers educators and researchers as the key audience. Rooted in strategic archival acquisitions and explored through educator-led partnerships, the team has developed an online repository with more than 74,000 records. This presentation will describe our workflow and openly accessible resource, as well as three key outputs that might be immediately useful to Florida educators. First, the Tampa Through Time Portal is a place-based interactive mapping portal that provides new ways to explore digitized FLENH materials. The ekphrastic Creekshed project, hosted by USF Libraries, uses FLENH archives to inspire local authors and students to write creative works grounded in the local watershed. Finally, the Botanical Gardens 360 Tours and USF Greenways map illustrate new approaches to capturing environmental spaces and pairing them with historic documents to produce immersive contemporary tours.

Conservation Pathways is a nonprofit organization that serves high school and college students interested in pursuing careers in conservation. We work with students to develop field research, science communication, and professionalism skills. Through our science communication focus, we provide field trips, presentations, and other environmental education opportunities for communities in Florida’s Big Bend region. This presentation will introduce our model for inspiring the next generation of conservation leaders, share best management practices for internship programs, and engage participants in a discussion about creative ways to use citizen science and experiential learning as tools to foster students’ and the general public’s connection to local ecosystems. Our fellows will practice their communication skills by sharing their personal experiences as well.

Learn why native plants are so important – and how to add them to the landscape. For example, plant keystone tree species or create a butterfly garden. Learn of helpful native plant websites and small grant programs for school plantings.

As environmentalists, our goal is to engage in activities that improve the well-being of the environment and promote the conservation and preservation of natural resources.  If environmentalists use AI, it raises important questions about whether this use aligns with their ecological values. Using correlation and regression analysis, I investigated how the ecological values of environmentalists influence their use of AI. Results will answer the question: “How environmentalists’ perceived usefulness of AI and their familiarity with AI's environmental impacts predictive factors of their AI usage?”.

This poster showcases how geospatial technologies and immersive media can enhance environmental education. Using high-resolution 360° imagery and virtual-tour software, the USF Botanical Gardens were captured and transformed into an interactive virtual experience. Visitors can navigate the gardens and click embedded buttons that link directly to the USF Plant Atlas, providing authoritative information on featured plant species.  The tour serves as a dynamic teaching and outreach resource: it allows students, researchers, and the public to explore Florida’s diverse plant communities anytime, while deepening understanding of native ecosystems.

Content is created each month to educate the campus community on various ways they can positively impact stormwater systems and keep our watershed free of pollutants. Presenters will explain their research, collaboration with partners, and methods of communication.

Indigenous youth in the Amazon navigate rapid social and environmental changes while sustaining traditional knowledge and territorial stewardship. This study collaborates teachers, students and community members of a multiethnic Indigenous territory in the Colombian Amazon. Working alongside Indigenous teachers, researchers explore integrating traditional ecological and biocultural knowledge with K-12 science and environmental education through curriculum co-design. The collaborative process integrates a needs assessment done to understand the community views on education, conservation science, environmental issues and current practices for traditional knowledge articulation. Findings highlight the importance of community-based and traditional knowledge to root learning in the local context and facilitate nature stewardship. The researchers share about their co-design experience and the strategies developed to articulate indigenous and local knowledge with scientific and global perspectives of territories and conservation.