Princess Place Preserve is an important and critical ecological asset protecting saltwater marshes, Pellicer Creek  and the Matanzas estuary.  The preserve is part of the Guano, Tolomato, Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR) with headquarters located at our River to Sea Preserve at Marineland. 

The GTMNERR has constructed a small Campbell Scientific Weather reporting station, the newest addition to the System-Wide Monitoring Program, at Princess Place Preserve.  The 10-foot tall aluminum tower serves as a backbone for the attachment of environmental sensors that record air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and photosynthetically active radiation (the solar energy that plants use in the process of photosynthesis).  An additional instrument devised to measure rainfall levels is situated approximately 2 feet away from the tower.  Both the tower and rain gauge are mounted to a 5-foot high wooden platform located at the water’s edge within the Princess Place Preserve near the mouth of Pellicer Creek on the east side of the preserve.  

The location of the weather station is optimal in the sense that it is within the aquatic system that the GTMNERR is striving to understand (in the salt marsh with a distant tree line verses a nearby upland area) and within close proximity to their Pellicer Creek water quality monitoring station.       

Princess Place is also part of the Pellicer Creek Aquatic Preserve.  The Pellicer Creek Aquatic Preserve includes Faver Dykes State Park, the St Johns River Water Management District's Pellicer Corridor Conservation Area lands and the Florida Agricultural Museum lands.  Together, these publicly owned lands protect and preserve Pellicer Creek and the Pellicer Flats which are part of the Matanzas Estuary.