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Thanks. December through February, Saturday departures at 10am per their brochure.

Thank you. I have the footage for several more places, but have been remiss in producing the videos as Ive been focused on redoing the analysis and the Last Great Places website. Definitely intend to keep them short and sweet.

Thanks! Have footage for 2 more great places but need time to script and edit.

Thank you. It's a special place.

Thanks for your attentive comment Daniel. According to The Nature Conservancy ecoregion maps, Congaree NP lies at the border of the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain and the South Atlantic Coastal Plain ecoregions, with the vast majority in the mid Atlantic and a sliver in the south Atlantic. It is very close to the border of the Piedmont Ecoregion. The Conservancy used a variation of Bailey's ecoregions. I would be happy to send you a screen shot from ArcGIS. Ecoregions are artificial but useful human constructs, mainly to help assure we capture ecosystems across a variety of climate and geological gradients. Mother Nature of course is infinitely more complex. Thanks again. Greg

@@lastgreatplaces okay I see what you mean. I live in lowcountry of SC right outside of Charleston which is categorized under South Atlantic coastal plain. Or at least from what I researched. I dont think I've ever been up to congaree so I started to research it a bit and stumbled on your video.

Definitely make the trip to Congaree! It's the best and most accessible bottomland swamp in the southeast. I was there in very early Spring when the water was high.

That’s Shadow

@@lastgreatplaces Wow, cool! I can see why they are called shadow. Does Shadow like walking with you when you explore the wildlife reserves?

@@yonaofthedawn5428 Dogs are allowed on trails in US national forests and in some wildlife refuges, but not in most National Parks. Shadow is my brother’s dog and he loves the great outdoors.

@@lastgreatplaces Awesome!

Thanks for your thoughtful comment Robert, and for noting for other viewers the many rare and endangered species in the Everglades. Indeed, I stated that the Everglades has over 30 rare/threatened species, but was not a hotspot “for an area of its size.” The metric for scoring Last Great Places imperiled species rarity is based on the mean habitat rarity score for the area, so the Everglades has a high size bar at 1.5 million acres. In contrast, Juniper Prairie Wilderness, at just 14,000 acres, gets a higher mean score with far fewer imperiled species. Please see the Methods description at last lastgreatplaces.us. No scoring metric is “perfect”, but this GIS metric from Natureserve allows us to pick up important smaller places for imperiled species. It’s hard to do justice to these Great Places in videos less than 4 minutes, but I’m trying to reach a larger audience than the website is ever likely to reach. Thanks again, and please do add Comments on the upcoming Places and any other suggestions. Best wishes, Greg

@@lastgreatplaces I disagree with many of the base principles set forth in your methodology. Using ESA listing as the metric for "Rare and Endangered" is faulty, it takes into account only listed species, endangered is not necessarily rare, and rare is not necessarily endangered. Using the Audubon Society as one of three sources for data is faulty- insects, reptiles, aquatic life, represent more of the biodiversity in an area than birds. The increased size of an area being a factor which LOWERS score is absurd- to state that an area of 14,000 acres with 2 endangered species is "Richer" or has higher score for "Endangered" species than 1.5 million acres that supports 30+ is illogical. By that logic, The National Key Deer refuge is the richest "Rare and Endangered" place on the planet.

@@robertconyers3159 Thanks for your dissenting thoughts. I sought to use relevant GIS-based datasets that are freely available to the public, and to consider important aspects of conserving natural diversity, taking into account places both large and small, and across all ecoregions. Factors such as landscape diversity and ecosystem diversity favor the larger landscapes. I chose to use the mean value at Places for imperiled species richness to capture important smaller sites for biodiversity conservation. I understand your counterpoint, and will give some thought to clarifying the terminology. The NatureServe map and discussion for "Richness of Imperiled Species in the Lower 48..." can be found at www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=6e90cefddb634e6a949838e7efff55fb. They do go beyond the ESA and also include "G1" ranked imperiled species. Some studies have shown that IBAs can be effective in capturing key sites or important populations of a wide range of other taxa. There is considerable overlap between the Audubon IBAs, the TNC ecoregional sites, and our great public lands -- these are the three national, place-based datasets that are available to the public, and I'm grateful that we all have access to them. The lastgreatplaces.us website provides access to the complete ranking spreadsheets, and any user is free to make evaluations using or weighting whatever factors they may consider relevant. Thanks again. I suspect we share many of the same biodiversity conservation goals. Greg

@@lastgreatplaces Good to see intelligent,civil discourse on social media. Thank you both.