Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Collier County, Florida

Photograph: Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.jpg by Photographer: Heather Henkel, U.S. Geological Survey · Public domain · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Collier County attraction

Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve

Collier County · South Florida & the Keys

110,000 acres of coastal land and water at the northern end of the Ten Thousand Islands.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

NOAA designated it in 1980, first as a sanctuary and then almost at once as a research reserve, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's Coastal Office manages it together with NOAA. What it protects is one of the few undisturbed mangrove estuaries left in North America: a nearly untouched subtropical mangrove forest and the water running through it. That matters beyond the birdwatching. An estuary of this kind is where a large share of the fish caught offshore begin their lives, so losing it would be felt out in the Gulf rather than only along the shoreline. Scientists here study fish, birds, water quality and the mangroves themselves, and the reserve uses those findings to manage the ground rather than filing them away. The Environmental Learning Center is the public side of it, with aquariums and exhibits explaining the estuary and what lives in it. The reserve exists at all because local people in 1964 stopped a road being driven through Rookery Bay

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official Website ↗

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