It can be missed sometimes, considering the attention the Austin Cary Forest receives, but the Natural Area Teaching Laboratory (NATL) is one of UF’s hidden treasures. Organizers of the recent Urban Forestry Summit in Gainesville made a trip there during one of the conference’s featured outings.
“We have a really diverse ecosystem here at NATL,” said Ross Barreto, a graduate student at the School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences (SFFGS) and land manager for NATL’s 70 acres.
The 70 acres makes NATL the largest conservation area on the main campus.
“We have a completely man-made wetland … that’s a stormwater treatment area,” Baretto continued. “It’s actually called the SEEP, the Stormwater Ecological Enhancement Project. That was built in 2002, and we (also) have a series of different meadows….”
Along with those features is a hardwood forest and upland pines. Like at Austin Cary, prescribed burns are part of the land management and learning experience at NATL. Baretto passed out images of these efforts to give urban foresters on the tour a look at how that appears. There are about 28 burnable acres at NATL, with around 3-6 acres burned at any one time.
“It’s very interesting burning here,” Baretto said. “We’re in the middle of the city, so it takes a lot of preparation, notification, and stuff like that, and very specific weather parameters to actually get a fire out here.
“The biggest thing we look at when we burn out here is dispersion. If you don’t know what dispersion is, it’s basically how stable the atmosphere is.”
With high dispersion, for instance, the smoke travels up and out quickly, without becoming a problem for nearby residents and workers.
There’s also a lot of ongoing invasive species management at NATL. While many people have a hand in invasives management, Christian Wanamaker, volunteer coordinator for UF/IFAS Invasive Species Survey Group, is doing most things invasive.
“Part of that also gets wrapped up into using citizen science tools to multiply our efforts to get that kind of surveying and monitoring done across the state,” Wanamaker said.
As part of his talk, he discussed how to use the Wild Spotter app to identify invasive plants, which a number of people tried out on their walk through the property. Wild Spotter is a tool tied into EDDMapS (Early Detection and Distribution Mapping System), an invasive species documentation project run by the University of Georgia.
“This is one of those ways that you can, with a relatively small number of folks, go out and and kind of ‘keep eyes on the ecosystem,’ as I like to phrase it, especially in areas that you don’t have the time or funding or manpower to go and monitor for yourselves,” Wanamaker said.
Photos: 2026 Urban Forestry Summit/NATL Tour | Flickr
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