On Friday, January 10, 2014 members of the USOC’s Athletes’ Advisory Council will partner with the Virginia Key Restoration Project to help restore the area’s natural habitat though a community restoration program.  Beginning with a tour of the nature area, AAC members will volunteer side-by-side with local school children, the City of Miami and Citizen’s staff in restoration efforts including:

• Transplanting native seedlings, saplings and trees at the nursery of Virginia Key.
• Removing exotic invasive vegetation in the Native Coastal Hammock area
• Removing plant debris from the nature trail.
• Preparing and mixing soil and compost.
• Spreading mulch on the trail.
• Planting a symbolic native tree

If you would like to volunteer or you have kids between the ages of 6-16 who would like to work hand in hand with Olympic athletes please let us know by January 1oth at 10 am @info@brickellandkbmoms.com. Brickell and KB moms will be there helping out too!

The History of Restoration at Virginia Key 

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew ripped across southern Miami-Dade County. As a result of the disaster, the Hurricane demonstrated the value of preserving our natural coastal areas for erosion control and shoreline stabilization, and increased the amount of attention and funding available for the restoration of Virginia Key.

Around the same time, Juan Fernandez, an environmental biologist from Cuba employed by the City of Miami as a Parks Naturalist, began painstakingly restoring the ecology of Virginia Key Beach one plant at a time. His team began with a severely degraded plot of 13 acres of land. At the time, Virginia Key Beach was covered with 70% invasive exotic plants. In the process of restoration, 106 native species were cataloged on Virginia Key Beach, including six endangered and five threatened species. Of these, a small population of the highly endangered Biscayne Bay Prickly Ash, of which only 74 exist in the United States, was discovered on Virginia Key Beach. Since their discovery, the population of the Biscayne Bay Prickly Ash has increased to 42, the largest population found in one location in the wild.

Today, exotics represent only 5 percent of the hammock habitat, and over 30 acres have been restored. Native plants used in the restoration are propagated onsite in the Virginia Key native plant nursery using seeds collected from the Virginia Key Beach hammock.

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