Exploring the Ecology of Florida

Did you know that over half of our current Nature Links participants live in Florida, or have at one time called Florida home? Even I lived in Gainesville 2017-2019!

Our current remote platform welcomes students from all over the country to participate. While we typically ground our curriculum in local Maine ecologies and communities, this winter I wanted to offer an overview of the complex, biodiverse ecosystems of Florida. Our Maine participants found that comparing an entirely different biome to our own here in the Northeast inspired lots of questions about what causes those differences.

Take a close look at the following photo. Was it taken in Florida or Maine?

The answer: North central Florida!

We started off class with this question since many of us in the Northeast have a limited imagination of Florida. We tend to conjure the mental image of an alligator sitting in a bright green swamp, or picture the highly developed beaches of Miami. In reality, most of Florida is covered in longleaf pine flatwoods, like the one above.

The light pink color in the above map indicates pine flatwoods ecosystems, that cover most of the state of Florida. These pine forests interweave with various types of wetlands. Note that purples, grays, and blues all signify some sort of wetland.

While pine flatwoods are often interspersed with wetland habitats, they tend to be on slightly higher, drier soil. For this reason they are prone to fire, and many of the flora and fauna actually depend on regular fires every 2-5 years to reproduce and clear out congested growth.

In areas where the ground is slightly wetter, and fires are less likely, a much more dense jungle of old-growth live oaks and various types of palm trees are able to flourish, as in the image below.

While Florida has a wet, warm subtropical climate perfect for supporting many forms of life, it also is covered in sandy soils that offer very little nutrients. When I moved to Florida from Vermont, planning to plant in a garden at my new home, I was completely puzzled how to go about it. First of all, I went from the 4 northern seasons: summer, fall, winter and spring - to two: wet and dry. Second, I was used to the rich dark riverbed soils of Southern Vermont. How could anything grow in Florida's white sands? To answer this, I decided to take a closer look at the adaptations of the most common undergrowth plant in the pine flatwoods: the saw palmetto.

Though you certainly won’t come across saw palmetto in Maine’s pine forests, in many ways it reminds me of some of our native scrubby pioneer plants such as the Jack Pine. Both saw palmetto and Jack Pine are adapted to poor soil by being extremely energy efficient, with tough waxy coated leaves (and in the Jack Pine’s case, armor-like bark), designed to withstand frequent fires.

When an organism lives in bad conditions, it needs to be efficient in order to survive. One way that saw palmetto stays efficient is by increasing the size and lifespan of its leaves, which last for 2-3 years. Instead of seasonally shedding its leaves like our Northern trees, and putting energy into generating new ones, this plant exists as one big, tough, long-lasting leaf. Many of Florida’s native plants exist in a similarly simple, stable way.

Because Florida is so flat, these pine woods and hardwood forests are sometimes difficult to delineate from Florida’s other major habitat: wetlands. These include the vast network of rivers and springs in Northern Florida that bubble up through the porous limestone bedrock and provide a warm winter refuge for manatees; the cypress groves all throughout the state; the expansive wetland prairies full of grazing mammals such as bison and millions of migratory birds; and the amazing sawgrass marshes of the Everglades in Southern Florida, where you will certainly encounter alligators, and might even spot a beautiful Roseate Spoonbill or bottlenose dolphins fishing in the mudflats.

All of the green areas indicate some type of wetland, while the blue indicates deepwater habitats such as lakes.

Alligators sunning on the shore of a prairie wetland.

Nature Links participants were delighted to recognize pickerel weed, a purple-flowered aquatic plant, in the above image of Payne’s Prairie, an expansive grassy wetland in North Central Florida. Pickerel weed can be found all over freshwater marshes and the shallow edges of lakes here in Maine.

Cypress trees, covered in airplants, grow out of the shallow waters of the Everglades. A white egret is one of Florida’s many iconic wetland birds.

Why is Florida covered in wetlands? One reason is that Florida’s climate is very wet. Most of the state has a subtropical climate, while the Everglades region has a fully tropical rainforest climate that rarely reaches freezing temperatures. Another reason is that Florida is almost completely flat. Water collects instead of draining, and where it does flow, it moves through the landscape very slowly - for example, the slow current of the Everglades sawgrass marshes moving the waters north to south.

The green here, which covers nearly the entire state of Florida, indicates 0-50 meters of elevation. A more detailed map would show that much of Florida is very barely above sea level. The varied colors at the top of the map show the southern end of the Appalachian mountains.

Historically wetlands covered more than half of Florida. Today, about half of those wetlands have survived the massive dredging and development projects of the last century. In the past, wetlands were considered obstacles to the development of the State. Widespread destruction and degradation of wetlands, however, resulted in drastic losses of wildlife, water shortages, and water quality problems. Today, Florida's wetlands are considered important resources and are protected by laws that preserve their esthetic and ecological value.

A photograph of the Everglades by Clyde Butcher, one of Florida’s most famous wilderness photographers, and advocate for the protection of these special ecosystems.

Florida’s ecology is a vast subject! There are many fascinating directions for further exploration - for example, you could learn more about Florida’s unique limestone geology, or take a closer look at the animal and plant species of the different ecosystems. You could dive into the coastal coral reefs, or follow the migration of manatees into the freshwater springs. I encourage you to follow your fascination! Our Nature Links group will certainly return to this comparative ecology as the winter wears on here in Maine.

- Maddy

I drew on several sources for this class, primarily from this wetland resource summary from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.