Brooker Creek Preserve Blog

Madison Bommelaere
Brooker Creek Preserve
                                                      Brooker Creek
             Brooker Creek, located on Keystone rd in Tarpon Springs is a vast and beautiful preserve. While exploring Brooker Creek(Keystone preserve) we observed many species of insects and birds including the HUGE Golden Orb Spider or also known as the Banana Spider and Vultures. There's many other animals including snakes and stuff hiding around, we just didn't see them. The preserve has a few different ecosystems such as a cypress swamp that's helps maintain water overflow, high pine grasslands, and pine flat woods. On this day we learned about indicator species, which is a species whose presence signifies that an entire integrated community of other species are present also like friends. Indicator species are also a sign that the ecosystem is healthy. We also learned about Keystone species which is a species that all the other species depend on. The disappearance of the keystone species means a loss in diversity of the animals in the ecosystem, like a gopher tortoise  creating homes and hiding places for the other animals. We also learned about the type of wetlands including the Seepage Wet lands, Floodplain Wetlands, Basin Wetlands, and Forested Wetlands and how they help the whole world control over flooding, recharge aquifers, good source of carbon storage and that it's a great animal habitat. Another thing we learned about was the growing stages of Slash pines going from, Broom Stage, Grass stage, and Adult Stage. One of most important things we learned was the importance of fires. Fires are usually man made in to make the plants release nutrients to help the ecosystem grow more, burn off the dry dead leaves and stuff that can cause a uncontrollable wild fire, opens up space for the animals, controls disease and alters temperature and moisture which is beneficial to the ecosystem. These man made fires to help the ecosystem are called prescribed fires.
                    All in all Brooker creek is an awesome place to visit and hike with your family and friends and I extremely recommend this park. When my class and I visited it was a comfy  79 degrees but most of the park is shaded by forest and high trees that it would still be fine to go on a hotter day.