Everglades National Park is a national park of the United States that protects the southern twenty percent of the original Everglades in Florida. The park is the largest tropical wilderness in the United States and the largest wilderness of any kind east of the Mississippi River. An average of one million people visit the park each year. Everglades is the third-largest national park in the contiguous United States after Death Valley and Yellowstone. UNESCO declared the Everglades & Dry Tortugas Biosphere Reserve in 1976 and listed the park as a World Heritage Site in 1979, and the Ramsar Convention included the park on its list of Wetlands of International Importance in 1987. Everglades is one of only three locations in the world to appear on all three lists.
Wildlife crossings are structures that allow animals to cross human-made barriers safely. Wildlife crossings may include underpass tunnels or wildlife tunnels, viaducts, and overpasses or green bridges ; amphibian tunnels; fish ladders; canopy bridges ; tunnels and culverts ; and green roofs.
The Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge is a 145,188-acre (587.55 km2) wildlife sanctuary is located west of Boynton Beach, in Palm Beach County, Florida. It is also known as Water Conservation Area 1 (WCA-1). It includes the most northern remnant of the historic Everglades wetland ecosystem.
Wildlife conservation refers to the practice of protecting wild species and their habitats in order to maintain healthy wildlife species or populations and to restore, protect or enhance natural ecosystems. Major threats to wildlife include habitat destruction, degradation, fragmentation, overexploitation, poaching, pollution, climate change, and the illegal wildlife trade. The IUCN estimates that 42,100 species of the ones assessed are at risk for extinction. Expanding to all existing species, a 2019 UN report on biodiversity put this estimate even higher at a million species. It is also being acknowledged that an increasing number of ecosystems on Earth containing endangered species are disappearing. To address these issues, there have been both national and international governmental efforts to preserve Earth's wildlife. Prominent conservation agreements include the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). There are also numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGO's) dedicated to conservation such as the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International.
The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) is a region that consists of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and some southern states of Mexico. The area acts as a natural land bridge from South America to North America, which is important for species who use the bridge in migration. Due to the extensive unique habitat types, Mesoamerica contains somewhere between 7 and 10% of the world’s known species.
The Florida panther is a North American cougar population in South Florida. It lives in pinelands, tropical hardwood hammocks and mixed freshwater swamp forests. Its range includes the Big Cypress National Preserve, Everglades National Park, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, Picayune Strand State Forest, as well as rural communities in the counties of Collier, Hendry, Lee, Miami-Dade, and Monroe County. It is the only confirmed cougar population in the Eastern United States, and currently occupies 5% of its historic range. As of 2024, about 200 individuals are left in the wild.
Clyde Butcher is an American large-format camera photographer known for wilderness photography of the Florida landscape. He began his career doing color photography before switching to large-scale black-and-white landscape photography after the death of his son. Butcher is a strong advocate of conservation efforts and uses his work to promote awareness of the beauty of natural places.
A wildlife corridor, also known as a habitat corridor, or green corridor, is an designated area that connects wildlife populations that have been separated by human activities or structures, such as development, roads, or land clearings. These corridors enable movement of individuals between populations, which helps to prevent negative effects of inbreeding and reduced genetic diversity, often caused by genetic drift, that can occur in isolated populations. Additionally, corridors support the re-establishment of populations that may have been reduced or wiped out due to random events like fires or disease. They can also mitigate some of the severe impacts of habitat fragmentation, a result of urbanization that divides habitat areas and restricts animal movement. Habitat fragmentation from human development poses an increasing threat to biodiversity, and habitat corridors help to reduce its harmful effects.
Wetland conservation is aimed at protecting and preserving areas of land including marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens that are covered by water seasonally or permanently due to a variety of threats from both natural and anthropogenic hazards. Some examples of these hazards include habitat loss, pollution, and invasive species. Wetland vary widely in their salinity levels, climate zones, and surrounding geography and play a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity, ecosystem services, and support human communities. Wetlands cover at least six percent of the Earth and have become a focal issue for conservation due to the ecosystem services they provide. More than three billion people, around half the world's population, obtain their basic water needs from inland freshwater wetlands. They provide essential habitats for fish and various wildlife species, playing a vital role in purifying polluted waters and mitigating the damaging effects of floods and storms. Furthermore, they offer a diverse range of recreational activities, including fishing, hunting, photography, and wildlife observation.
Tropical hardwood hammocks are closed canopy forests, dominated by a diverse assemblage of evergreen and semi-deciduous tree and shrub species, mostly of West Indian origin. Tropical hardwood hammocks are found in South Florida or the Everglades, with large concentrations on the Miami Rock Ridge, in the Florida Keys, along the northern shores of Florida Bay, and in the Pinecrest region of the Big Cypress Swamp.
Conservation photography is the active use of the photographic process and its products, within the parameters of photojournalism, to advocate for conservation outcomes.
Burmese pythons are native to Southeast Asia. However, since the end of the 20th century, they have become an established breeding population in South Florida. The earliest python sightings in Florida date back to the 1930s and although Burmese pythons were first sighted in Everglades National Park in the 1990s, they were not officially recognized as a reproducing population until 2000. Since then, the number of python sightings has exponentially increased with over 30,000 sightings from 2008 to 2010.
The South Florida rocklands ecoregion, in the tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests biome, occurs in southern Florida and the Florida Keys in the United States, where they would naturally cover an area of 2,100 km2 (810 sq mi). These forests form on limestone outcrops with very thin soil; the higher elevation separating them from other habitats such as coastal marshes and marl prairies. On mainland Florida, rocklands exist primarily on the Miami Rock Ridge, which extends from the Miami River south to Everglades National Park. South Florida rocklands are further divided into pine rocklands and rockland hammocks.
Lost Land of the Tiger is a three-part nature documentary series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit which follows a scientific expedition to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. The expedition team is made up of specialist zoologists, explorers and the BBC crew. Together, they explore wilderness areas from the lowland jungles to high-elevation slopes, in search of rare animals and plants. The focus of the expedition is to investigate the status of the tiger in Bhutan, where little is known of the cat's distribution or population density. Evidence of a healthy population of tigers would elevate Bhutan's importance as a sanctuary for this endangered species. It would also support tiger conservationist Dr. Alan Rabinowitz's proposal for a vast protected corridor linking the fragmented pockets of tiger habitat which lie to the south of the Himalayas.
The Florida Wildlife Corridor is a statewide network of nearly 18 million acres of connected ecosystems containing state parks, national forests, and wildlife management areas that support wildlife and human occupation. The corridor seeks to connect wildlife habitats, reducing their fragmentation and the subsequent declines in plant and animal populations caused by human activities The Florida Wildlife Corridor was conceived by Tom Hoctor, director of the University of Florida's Center for Landscape and Conservation Planning, and Carlton Ward Jr., with further inspiration partly from Lawton Chiles.
Elam S. Stoltzfus is an American environmental documentary filmmaker.
The Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area, created in 2012, the newest addition and 556th unit of the United States National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) System, began with 10 acres (4.0 ha) donated to the conservation effort as part of the Obama administration's America's Great Outdoors Initiative.
Betty Osceola is a Native American Everglades grandmother, environmental activist, educator, anti-fracking and clean water advocate. She is a member of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida from the Panther Clan. Osceola was born and raised in the Everglades. She spent her upbringing living off the land, hunting and fishing with her father. She is an airboat captain and the operator of Buffalo Tiger Airboat Tours on Tamiami Trail in Miami, Florida.
The Disney Wilderness Preserve is a 11,500-acre nature reserve near Kissimmee, Florida. It was created through an agreement between The Walt Disney Company, The Nature Conservancy, and the state of Florida. It is located fifteen miles south of Walt Disney World.
Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed (CREW) is a conservation area in Florida covering more than 60,000 acres in Lee County, Florida and Collier County, Florida. It provides habitat for species including the Florida panther, snail kite, bobcat, and wood stork. Public trails are part of the preserve. CREW connects to various protected land areas.
