Rose Schnabel

A language barrier between a Spanish-speaking detainee and an English-speaking officer turned a request for the bathroom into a month of solitary confinement at the Baker County Detention Center.

Warmer temperatures and new technologies help an industry once lost to freezes.

A circuit court judge ordered the Florida Department of Environmental Protection on Tuesday to explain why it hasn’t proposed a set of protective rules for the state’s springs nearly nine years after it was ordered to by the Florida Legislature.

Row crops and animal operations were the agricultural industries hardest hit by Hurricane Helene, which made landfall on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane, according to a preliminary report published on Tuesday by researchers at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Water levels, rare plants and ancient fish are among Florida’s natural resources that could be protected by a proposed expansion to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

Alachua County voters reelected incumbent District 3 County Commissioner Anna Prizzia on Tuesday night in a hard-fought race.

These tensions among agriculture, water quality and fishing play out from the Suwannee River Valley in Florida to to northern states, like Ohio, around Lake Erie. Amid ongoing discussions of the waterways’ inherent ecological value, new research zeros in on water quality and economic impacts of future land use changes.

For 30 years, developers and conservationists fought over the flowered sand banks of Castle Hill in Lake County. As construction crews move in, a driven group of plant experts and retirees races to salvage the area’s native plants.

The incumbent commissioner, Anna Prizzia, is a Democrat. Jenn Garrett is the Republican candidate.

House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Steinhatchee on Thursday afternoon to applaud the community’s recovery efforts and assure residents that long-term help is on the way.