Gold Award project brings sea turtles and geocaching together

Girl Scout Senior Rebecca Devoid recently partnered with the Sea Turtle Preservation Society on her Gold Award project, a geocache learning series about sea turtles and conservation.

The goal of a Gold Award project is to bring awareness to an issue in a community and help solve it. For Rebecca’s Gold Award, she worked with the Sea Turtle Preservation Society to place a 10-part interactive learning Geocache series in Brevard County, FL, to help raise awareness about sea turtles and the issues they face. Each geocache is unique and features a different issue such as climate change, oil spills, artificial lighting, and much more. She hopes this will encourage people to get outside, explore their community, and learn about sea turtles.

“I wanted to work with the sea turtles because I wanted to help endangered species close to home,” says Rebecca, who is a member of Girl Scout Troop 1978 in Melbourne, FL.

She worked on the project for eight months, and a volunteer from the STPS education program worked with Rebecca during that time.

If you’re unfamiliar with geocaching, it’s basically a real-world outdoor treasure hunt that uses GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to specific coordinates and then use clues to search for the geocache, or hidden container, at the location. Geocaches come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are large containers and others are as small as your thumbnail.

If you are interested, you can download the free Geocaching app to your smart device to get started and search Sea Turtle Trek Series to find these caches. If you’re new to geocaching, the app is user friendly and will guide you through what you need to do. The Sea Turtle Trek Series caches are located along the coast in Brevard County on the beachheads from the Eau Gallie Causeway north to the Pineda Causeway.

For those new to geocaching, here are some guidelines:

• Geocaches are never buried
• Respect your surroundings
• Bring your own pen or pencil to add the date to the cache log
• If you take an item from a cache, leave an item in the cache

An informational card on the geocaching project is available at the STPS Turtle House, 111 S. Miramar Ave., in Indialantic. For questions about the geocaching project, please contact the STPS education program at education@seaturtlespacecoast.org.