Weekday serenity at Poe Springs Park offers a peaceful retreat into “Original Florida,” where the only sounds are those of nature. But come summertime, and especially on holidays like Labor Day weekend, the park comes alive with laughter and the joyful chatter of visitors savoring the refreshing, crystal-clear spring waters.

HIGH SPRINGS ‒ After a series of closures due to weather events, renovations, the COVID-19 pandemic, and most recently Hurricane Debby, Poe Springs Park is once again open to the public. The park’s reopening on Aug. 31, 2024, perfectly coincided with the Labor Day weekend, providing a scenic outdoor escape for holiday revelers at Alachua County’s largest natural spring.

This past weekend, visitors flocked to the park to enjoy various activities such as tubing, kayaking, hiking, and barbecuing, making the most of the park’s reopening after its recent closure due to flooding from Hurricane Debby. While the park is now operating on its regular seven-days-a-week schedule, Alachua County officials have issued a cautionary advisory for visitors: do not drink the water without boiling it first to kill bacteria and other harmful organisms.

Poe Springs, which pumps an impressive 45 million gallons of crystal-clear water daily, has been a beloved recreation spot for nearly 70 years. The park offers a variety of amenities, including swimming in the spring area, extensive hiking trails, kayak and canoe launches, sports fields, and a lodge building for event rentals, such as parties, family gatherings, and small weddings. The grounds are also equipped with playgrounds, volleyball courts, and picnic shelters complete with barbecue grills.

The park’s history has been marked by a series of openings and closures to accommodate necessary repairs and improvements. Originally privately owned, the initial 75-acre parcel of Poe Springs was acquired by Alachua County in 1985 using a federal grant from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Additional acreage was later provided by the Suwannee River Water Management District (SRWMD) and further grant funds throughout the 1980s. The park officially opened to the public in 1991 and has since become a popular weekend destination.

Poe Springs has faced several closures over the years due to a variety of factors. It was shut down in December 2011 for extensive construction, which included installing a new retaining wall and steps in the swimming area, as well as updating landscaping and building roofs and air-conditioning units. The park reopened on July 4, 2013, operating four days a week under an arrangement with the City of High Springs, but closed again in 2017 following damage from Hurricane Irma. After repairs, it reopened in May 2018 with a limited schedule of Friday to Sunday.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced another closure in March 2020 under State quarantine mandates, but the park reopened three months later. The springs area, however, closed again in September 2020 for additional renovations, though the boat ramp remained accessible.

Planned to reopen in January 2021, delays pushed the reopening to Memorial Day weekend of that year. The park faced yet another setback in July 2021 when Tropical Storm Elsa caused severe flooding, prompting another temporary closure.

Now, with the park once again open to the public, visitors can enjoy all the natural beauty and recreational amenities Poe Springs Park has to offer. The park features pavilions and picnic shelters, multipurpose fields, a boardwalk through the cypress swamp, and access to the springs via a series of loop trails. For boaters, the park provides a boat launch and a dock with access to the river.

Poe Springs Park is located at 28800 N.W. 182^nd Avenue, High Springs. The entrance fee is $6 per vehicle or $1 per person for walk-in or bicycle entry. However, entry is free from October to April, and fees are waived for individuals with disabilities.

As Poe Springs Park welcomes visitors back, it continues to be a popular destination for outdoor enthusiasts and families looking to enjoy the great outdoors.

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ALACHUA ‒ The Alachua Business League (ABL) held their first workshop of the year, titled “Mobile Mastery with Moxie Media” at the Good Life Station on Main Street in Alachua.

Joe Hancock, with Moxie Media, described to a full house how each person in the room has the ability to use their own cell phone to do advertising videos for their own business. He touched on the basics of composition and lighting, but stressed how easy it is to get your message out through social media without spending a lot of time or money. It was a timely subject and got a good reception from those in attendance.

Next month Campus USA Credit Union in Alachua is hosting a “Meet & Greet” on Monday, Sept. 16 at 6 P.M. Check the new and improved ABL website at www.alachuabusiness.com for more information and to RSVP.

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ALACHUA ‒ The Alachua Police Department (APD) conducted an intensive active shooter training session on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024, at the Santa Fe Institute of Public Safety. The training, hosted by C3 Pathways / NCIER, focused on equipping APD supervisors and officers with the necessary skills to respond effectively to active shooter situations.

The training session, named Active Shooter Incident Management Basic Training, aimed to prepare law enforcement personnel, fire departments, and EMS responders to handle active shooter incidents swiftly and efficiently.

Active shooter incidents are unpredictable and can happen anywhere, from schools and workplaces to public spaces. The devastating impact of these events has highlighted the critical need for comprehensive training for first responders, including law enforcement, fire departments, and emergency medical services (EMS). Active shooter training is essential for preparing first responders to effectively manage and mitigate these high-stress, rapidly evolving situations.

The training brought together various law enforcement agencies, highlighting the importance of interagency cooperation in emergency situations. By fostering a unified approach to crisis management, the training sought to improve communication and coordination among different first responders, ensuring a more effective response during critical incidents.

Every second counts during an active shooter incident. Proper training helps reduce response times by ensuring that first responders are familiar with their roles and can quickly deploy strategies to contain the threat. The program emphasizes three critical components: Command, Control, and Communications. These elements are crucial in ensuring that all first responders work as a cohesive team during emergencies, understanding their roles, and executing their duties seamlessly to protect and save lives.

APD emphasized the importance of such training in an online post, stating, “We're committed to the safety and well-being of our community, and continuous training like this is a critical part of that commitment.”

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~As a crew member on board the Blue Origin New Shepherd rocket, UF/IFAS researcher Rob Ferl will test how plants know they’re in space~

GAINESVILLE ‒ How do plants adapt when they go into space?

That’s the question the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) hopes to answer with a novel space-based experiment happening Thursday at 9 a.m. EST when a UF/IFAS horticultural sciences researcher launches with his experiment into suborbital space on a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket.

Rob Ferl, the University of Florida Astraeus Space Institute director, will fly in the Blue Origin craft and perform the experiment himself. The experiment builds on prior research that showed a type of plant – Arabidopsis thaliana – can detect that it is in space and then change how its genes are expressed.

"This moment is a milestone not just for the University of Florida and the Astraeus Space Institute but for an entire community of scientists who can now consider experiments in space that might have previously been viewed as impossible," said UF Interim President Kent Fuchs. "I look forward to cheering Rob on during Thursday’s mission and to watching him make history yet again."

This experiment will determine which genes turn on and off at various stages of flight. Although much is known about how plants respond to living in spaceflight environments, like the International Space Station, researchers know less about how plants respond molecularly as they travel to space. The experiment will provide new insights into how plants adjust their gene expression as they transition from Earth to space.

One day, plants might be an essential part of space exploration as food and air scrubbers, and understanding how they react to a space environment is the first step toward learning how to effectively grow them there.

“We envision plants will keep us alive in space or on the Moon,” said Ferl, who is also assistant vice president for UF Research. “What does it take to adapt to living in space? We’d like to know.”

Anna-Lisa Paul, co-principal investigator for the experiment, a horticultural sciences research professor and director of UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research, said researchers have only been able to see what this plant’s genes are like before and after space flight, not during.

“It’s something outside the evolutionary environment of any terrestrial species,” she said. “This is something we’re learning that has never been done before.”

The research was funded by a grant from NASA’s Flight Opportunities program and the agency’s Biological and Physical Sciences division.

Ferl will carry the plants in specialized tubes, called Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tubes (KFTs), that have a plunger to release a preservative solution. The tubes will be Velcroed to the legs of his flight suit during the flight. Before and after the flight, they will be moved in custom transit bags designed by the UF Space Plants Lab out of blackout fabric and a golden thermal blanket.

The experiment has a second purpose: to validate that having researchers do their own experiments on flights is a valuable use of research funding, rather than relying on untended experiments or robotics. This is the first NASA-supported researcher-tended suborbital flight.

“There’s something to be said about first-hand experience,” Ferl said. “The experiment is enriched when a human mind and a human brain go with it.”

The study will look at the plant’s transcriptome, the collection of all expressed RNA that contains answers to which genes are turned on and off to change the plant to adapt in a space environment. Ferl will chemically “lock” the genes with a preservative solution to pause the plants at a moment in time during various points in the launch – just before takeoff, at the start of zero gravity, at the end of zero gravity and at landing.

Researchers will then sequence the plants’ expressed genes and compare them to an on-Earth control experiment to figure out exactly which ones were activated or deactivated during the flight.

Jordan Callaham, assistant director for the UF Astraeus Space Institute and research coordinator for the UF Space Plants Lab in the UF/IFAS department of horticultural sciences, said this will help researchers begin to understand how plants would respond on space missions, on the Moon or on Mars. But it will also give them a better idea of the fundamental properties of the chemical pathways within plants and how they respond to all novel environments.

“We’re understanding how biology responds to space on a very basic level,” said Callaham, who will be doing the on-Earth control experiment while Ferl is on the Blue Origin rocket.

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