Weather and Whatever - Episode 2- Cedar Key, Small Town With Big Ideas

Major hurricanes. One small island. And a community like no other.

In this episode, I take you to Cedar Key. I met with local scientists and residents who are redefining what resilience really means. From a coffee shop turned food truck to living shorelines that protect the coast naturally, Cedar Key is proving that big solutions can come from small towns. Resilience isn’t just surviving the storm, it's recovering stronger than ever before and Cedar Key knows how to do just that.

Transcript

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00:00:00 Jaden Botini 

Cedar Key is a small town with big solutions. 

00:00:04 Jaden Botini 

Let's dive into all the ways Cedar Key shows its resilience in tough times. 

00:00:21 Jaden Botini 

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Weather and Whatever. 

00:00:25 Jaden Botini 

I'm your host, Jaden Botini, a broadcast meteorology student at the University of Florida. 

00:00:30 Jaden Botini 

On this podcast, we will be talking about anything and everything from all kinds of weather to whatever you can imagine. 

00:00:37 Jaden Botini 

Today's topic is Cedar Key, a small town that thinks big. 

00:00:42 Jaden Botini 

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of traveling to Cedar Key and meeting with some wonderful scientists at the University of Florida's Nature Coast Biological Station. 

00:00:52 Jaden Botini 

In my last episode, we talked about resilience along Florida's coast, and I do not believe that there is a better place to talk about resilience than Cedar Key. 

00:01:02 Jaden Botini 

In 2024, Cedar Key was hit with three hurricanes, and they experienced tremendous devastation on the island, and even though a few places are still in the works, it was truly 

00:01:12 Jaden Botini 

amazing to see how many businesses are up and running and carrying on after such a tough year for Cedar Key. 

00:01:19 Jaden Botini 

I got to speak with Hannah Healy, who is the owner of the Prickly Palm, which is just the cutest coffee shop ever and a must do if you are ever in Cedar Key. 

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But she had an almost groundbreaking idea after her business was no longer standing following the hurricanes. 

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She transformed her coffee shop into a food truck, and multiple people that I talked to had mentioned her story 

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and she is seen as just an inspiration to the community and also loved for her delicious coffee and treats, of course. 

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Her story just truly captures the essence of Cedar Key and how it really defines the word resilience. 

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Talking to Hannah, I learned a lot about how the community really helps each other out in difficult times, especially like the hurricane season they had in 2024. 

00:02:09 Jaden Botini 

Another Cedar Key resident that I talked to that mentioned how much of a helping hand the Cedar Key community is, Emily Colson, and she is the communications assistant and K through 12 education coordinator over at UF's Nature Coast Biological Station. 

00:02:26 Jaden Botini 

So I talked to her with some insight about how the city of Cedar Key is dealing with recovering after the hurricane season they had in 2024. 

00:02:36 Hannah Healy 

It's a really resilient, 

00:02:38 Hannah Healy 

Place and they're really great at just, I mean, as soon as they're able to get back on island and start working, they pitch in, everyone's helping each other. 

00:02:49 Hannah Healy 

I mean, for like a solid two, three weeks afterward, everyone was outside helping each other, like no downtime, like you're just out and fixing things and repairing things and trying to build stuff back. 

00:03:03 Hannah Healy 

So it's like, 

00:03:05 Hannah Healy 

serious time right after, but then you kind of slow down and it peters out and things start to open up finally. 

00:03:13 Hannah Healy 

And I think we're in really good shape now. 

00:03:16 Hannah Healy 

There's only a handful of businesses that were unable to open the way that they were. 

00:03:22 Jaden Botini 

So this comeback that Cedar Key has made truly would not be possible without this community that lives here, but it's not the only resilient thing in Cedar Key. 

00:03:31 Jaden Botini 

Another aspect of Cedar Key that really has shown its resilience is a species that's native here, and that's seagrass. 

00:03:39 Jaden Botini 

And seagrass is so, so important because it is an indicator species. 

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So what this means is that how healthy your seagrass is, is going to tell you how healthy the rest of your ecosystem is. 

00:03:52 Jaden Botini 

Seagrass is used in research to see how much an ecosystem is thriving. 

00:03:57 Jaden Botini 

And I got to talk with a seagrass expert, Annie Hensel. 

00:04:01 Jaden Botini 

She is the senior postdoctoral research associate at the Nature Coast Biological Station, and she really is a seagrass expert. 

00:04:09 Jaden Botini 

I talked with her about her research and what she's finding about seagrass near seagrass. 

00:04:15 Jaden Botini 

your key. 

00:04:15 Jaden Botini 

So I'm going to pass it off to her. 

00:04:17 Annie Hensel 

So seagrass is just like a grass that you find on your lawn. 

00:04:21 Annie Hensel 

It's a flowering plant with roots and rhizomes and leaves and flowers and seeds. 

00:04:27 Annie Hensel 

And many organisms are dependent on it as finding food within it, just like you would find food within a prairie or a grassland or even a forest, finding all the bugs and the worms that the birds need to eat. 

00:04:39 Annie Hensel 

Same thing goes for those fish. 

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They're searching inside this 

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luscious seagrass for crabs, snails, amphipods. 

00:04:48 Annie Hensel 

Another really one that always like sparks people is like scallops can't survive without seagrass. 

00:04:54 Annie Hensel 

They, their larval comes in, they settle down and they have to attach themselves to seagrass for a few months until they detach and then they grow and then hopefully, you know, during scout season someone finds the legal size and gets to enjoy it as a fishery. 

00:05:10 Annie Hensel 

And so the other, you know, 

00:05:12 Annie Hensel 

Big piece with seagrass, they provide a lot of, they can help with water clarity as well as holding in sediment, and they can hold a lot of carbon. 

00:05:23 Annie Hensel 

So if you've ever heard the term like blue carbon and carbon sequestration, seagrass is a big component of that. 

00:05:30 Annie Hensel 

There's mangroves as well with blue carbon, but seagrass is a pretty good holder of doing carbon sequestration as well. 

00:05:39 Annie Hensel 

And they can even uptake, 

00:05:41 Annie Hensel 

nitrogen from the water column as well. 

00:05:43 Annie Hensel 

So through a denitrification process. 

00:05:47 Annie Hensel 

So yeah, they do all sorts of things. 

00:05:49 Jaden Botini 

Wow. 

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So the health of the seagrass is really so important. 

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And it's truly amazing how one species that, I mean, people see this on the beach all the time, washed up on the sand and they're like, ew. 

00:06:03 Jaden Botini 

But really, seagrass is so, so important. 

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It's a habitat, it's food, and it can tell us so much about our 

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marine ecosystems. 

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But in Cedar Key, the resilience doesn't just end at their community and their seagrass. 

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There's so much more to unpack about Cedar Key's resilience. 

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And one of the things they're implementing are living shorelines. 

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So these have already been proved resilient in Cedar Key after being put to the test last hurricane season, which we'll talk about more in just a minute. 

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But what are living shorelines? 

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So living shorelines are the use of naturalistic materials to prevent shoreline erosion, minimize wave impact on shore, and it also absorbs unwanted nutrients from stormwater runoff, and simultaneously, it creates habitats for coastal wildlife. 

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Something really cool that I learned about Cedar Keys living shorelines is they're using a hybrid design. 

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So what that means is they're taking naturalistic materials, 

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plants, things that you would see on a living shoreline, and making that living shoreline in front of already designed infrastructure that's already helping to protect the coast. 

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So it's kind of a double barrier there. 

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Inhabiting Cedar Keys living shorelines, there is a multitude of species, including mangroves, cordgrass, 

00:07:29 Jaden Botini 

oyster barriers, and so much more. 

00:07:32 Jaden Botini 

So joining us once again is Haley Cox, the Coastal Resilience Program Coordinator at the Nature Coast Biological Station. 

00:07:40 Jaden Botini 

I talked to her in my last episode, and she is back to tell us more about these living shorelines and how Cedar Key is implementing them and how they're already protecting Cedar Key's coast. 

00:07:51 Haley Cox 

So the first thing that went in 2020 

00:07:56 Haley Cox 

were these reef balls here. 

00:07:58 Haley Cox 

But these are precast concrete oyster domes. 

00:08:03 Haley Cox 

They're called reef balls. 

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A company down in Sarasota called Reef Innovations manufactured these. 

00:08:11 Haley Cox 

They come in a lot of different sizes. 

00:08:14 Haley Cox 

These were the pallet-sized balls, so each one of them, before any living organism attached to it, 

00:08:23 Haley Cox 

They weighed about 1,300 pounds apiece, so they had to be deployed by barge. 

00:08:30 Haley Cox 

We rely a lot on volunteer support, but that was something that we had to get some serious equipment to put out here. 

00:08:41 Haley Cox 

And their primary purpose, not just to, you know, enhance oyster habitat, 

00:08:48 Haley Cox 

It's to diminish wave energy. 

00:08:50 Haley Cox 

So the waves that are coming onto the shoreline here and causing that erosional action, we want to try and put something out further in the water that can kind of absorb that energy. 

00:09:04 Haley Cox 

They've done a really great job. 

00:09:06 Haley Cox 

of it as the tide goes down you can see kind of like the sediment accretion around the base of them which is really interesting to see but yeah within two months of them being deployed they had oysters growing on them and Cedar Keys an awesome place for oyster restoration because it's not what we call a spat limited system so like there's plenty of oysters out in the water they just need something to attach to so if you build it 

00:09:36 Haley Cox 

the oysters will come. 

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And they did. 

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And that's been really successful. 

00:09:41 Haley Cox 

After the breakwaters were installed, that's when we came in with fill sand here to kind of change the elevation a little bit, make it more of a gentle slope instead of that concrete apron down to 

00:09:56 Haley Cox 

essentially like a mudflat that was here before. 

00:09:59 Haley Cox 

We had a ton of sand delivered along the shoreline. 

00:10:02 Haley Cox 

It was graded. 

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And then we come in with the planting. 

00:10:06 Haley Cox 

This is an intentionally unvegetated section of beach. 

00:10:10 Haley Cox 

We have to have a lot of stakeholder involvement here. 

00:10:16 Haley Cox 

because in Florida, property owners, they own up to the mean high water line. 

00:10:21 Haley Cox 

So some of this is private property that we're on. 

00:10:27 Haley Cox 

So obviously everyone here was involved in the design process and making sure that the property owners were satisfied with the proposed solutions. 

00:10:41 Haley Cox 

And they wanted to leave this section as kind of a public access point or just, you know, an area where there weren't any dense plantings. 

00:10:50 Haley Cox 

For the most part, you know, we relied solely on volunteer labor to get all of these plants in the ground. 

00:10:59 Haley Cox 

We originally had, and this is what you can see impacted by the storm, there was like an area of higher elevation 

00:11:09 Haley Cox 

where we had a dune system, a very low profile dune installed with things like sea oats, dune sunflower. 

00:11:18 Haley Cox 

But that was the first to go when these projects started getting impacted by storms, just because those plants can't tolerate inundation from saltwater. 

00:11:30 Haley Cox 

So I'm happy to see that a lot of them down there have recovered, but the ones that were further up top, 

00:11:37 Haley Cox 

We lost the plants and we lost the sand there. 

00:11:40 Haley Cox 

So it's been kind of redistributed along the shoreline. 

00:11:44 Jaden Botini 

While I was chatting with Haley about the living shorelines, I got to walk around and really see them in action. 

00:11:50 Jaden Botini 

You could see the waves crashing on the oyster barriers and stopping that wave motion and also all the plants planted in the sand that just helped that soil erosion. 

00:11:59 Jaden Botini 

So that was super cool as well. 

00:12:02 Jaden Botini 

It's really so amazing how these living shorelines grow and evolve on their own. 

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and they continue to get stronger and stronger. 

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And I think that was really displayed here by the lack of damage we saw on the road that was just behind the Living Shoreline. 

00:12:17 Jaden Botini 

So that Living Shoreline is really protecting the infrastructure and protecting the shore, which is what it's meant to do. 

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And another super cool aspect of Living Shorelines is how they're almost customizable. 

00:12:31 Jaden Botini 

So Haley was talking to me about how there's an abundance of oysters in Cedar Key, and that's why 

00:12:37 Jaden Botini 

they implement these oyster domes, but as this project gets taken along the Gulf Coast, it can be catered to whatever plants, animals, and reef habitats will thrive in each specific environment. 

00:12:49 Jaden Botini 

So that's amazing and that just shows how it can be strong in many different locations along the Gulf. 

00:12:56 Jaden Botini 

It has been such a wonderful opportunity to come out to Cedar Key and see these really creative ways that the nature coast is protecting itself and the fact that it's 

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implemented and it's working already is amazing. 

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One other thing before we go that I didn't mention yet is most of the houses in Cedar Key are raised or currently in the process of being raised on concrete stilts to protect from wave impact and storm surge. 

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So that's just another thing that's going to help protect this beautiful island. 

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after visiting, I think Cedar Key is truly making strides in their efforts to evolve as our environment changes, and it's been a pleasure to get to experience it firsthand and learn about all the ways that this community stands together. 

00:13:42 Jaden Botini 

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Weather and Whatever. 

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Stay tuned for episode three, where we talk all things coastal restoration in my hometown of Tampa Bay. 

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Rain or shine, it's Jaden Bottini, and I'll talk to you next time. 

00:13:56 Jaden Botini 

Bye!