The Everglades is a natural region of flooded grasslands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida, comprising the southern half of a large drainage basin within the Neotropical realm. The system begins near Orlando with the Kissimmee River, which discharges into the vast but shallow Lake Okeechobee. Water leaving the lake in the wet season forms a slow-moving river 60 miles (97 km) wide and over 100 miles (160 km) long, flowing southward across a limestone shelf to Florida Bay at the southern end of the state. The Everglades experiences a wide range of weather patterns, from frequent flooding in the wet season to drought in the dry season. Throughout the 20th century, the Everglades suffered significant loss of habitat and environmental degradation.
Everglades National Park is an American national park 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.
Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary is a National Audubon Society sanctuary located in southwest Florida, north of Naples, Florida and east of Bonita Springs, in the United States. The sanctuary was established to protect one of the largest remaining stands of bald cypress and pond cypress in North America from extensive logging that was ongoing throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
Myakka River State Park is a Florida State Park, that is located nine miles (14 km) east of Interstate 75 in Sarasota County and a portion of southeastern Manatee County on the Atlantic coastal plain. This state park consists of 37,000 acres (150 km2), making it one of the state's largest parks. It is also one of the oldest parks in the state. It was delineated in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. A small portion of the park was the gift of the family of Bertha Palmer to the state. The park is named after the Myakka River.
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.
The Arboretum of the University of Central Florida is located on the main campus of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, United States. Covering 80 acres (320,000 m2), it contains more than 600 species of plants, including more than 100 bromeliads, in cultivated gardens.
The Apalachicola National Forest is the largest U.S. National Forest in the state of Florida. It encompasses 632,890 acres and is the only national forest located in the Florida Panhandle. The National Forest provides water and land-based outdoors activities such as off-road biking, hiking, swimming, boating, hunting, fishing, horse-back riding, and off-road ATV usage.
Big Cypress National Preserve is a United States National Preserve located in South Florida, about 45 miles west of Miami on the Atlantic coastal plain. The 720,000-acre (2,900 km2) Big Cypress, along with Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas, became the first national preserves in the United States National Park System when they were established on October 11, 1974. In 2008, Florida film producer Elam Stoltzfus featured the preserve in a PBS documentary.
Collier–Seminole State Park is a Florida State Park located on US 41, 17 miles (27 km) south of Naples, Florida. The park is the home of a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark, the Bay City Walking Dredge used to build the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades. The park includes of 6,430 acres (26 km2) of mangrove swamp, cypress swamps, salt marshes, mangrove river estuaries, and pine flatwoods. Among the wildlife of the park are American alligators, raccoons, ospreys, and American white ibis. brown pelicans, wood storks, bald eagles, red-cockaded woodpeckers, American crocodiles, Florida black bears and Big Cypress fox squirrels also inhabit the park.
Hammock is a term used in the southeastern United States for stands of trees, usually hardwood, that form an ecological island in a contrasting ecosystem. Hammocks grow on elevated areas, often just a few inches high, surrounded by wetlands that are too wet to support them. The term hammock is also applied to stands of hardwood trees growing on slopes between wetlands and drier uplands supporting a mixed or coniferous forest. Types of hammocks found in the United States include tropical hardwood hammocks, temperate hardwood hammocks, and maritime or coastal hammocks. Hammocks are also often classified as hydric, mesic or xeric. The types are not exclusive, but often grade into each other.
The Florida Trail is one of eleven National Scenic Trails in the United States. It currently runs 1,500 miles (2,400 km), from Big Cypress National Preserve to Fort Pickens at Gulf Islands National Seashore, Pensacola Beach. Also known as the Florida National Scenic Trail, the Florida Trail provides permanent non-motorized recreation opportunity for hiking and other compatible activities and is within an hour of most Floridians. The Florida National Scenic Trail is designated as a National Scenic Trail by the National Trails System Act of 1968.
The Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge is part of the United States National Wildlife Refuge System, located in southwestern Florida, twenty miles east of Naples, in the upper segment of the Fakahatchee Strand of the Big Cypress Swamp. It is north of I-75 and west of SR 29.
Colt Creek State Park is a Florida State Park in Central Florida, 16 miles (26 km) north of Lakeland off of State Road 471. This 5,067 acre park nestled within the Green Swamp Wilderness Area and named after one of the tributaries that flows through the property was opened to the public on January 20, 2007. Composed mainly of pine flatwoods, cypress domes and open pasture land, this piece of pristine wilderness is home to many animal species including the American bald eagle, Southern fox squirrel, gopher tortoise, white-tailed deer, wild turkey and bobcat.
Before drainage, the Everglades, a region of tropical wetlands in southern Florida, were an interwoven mesh of marshes and prairies covering 4,000 square miles (10,000 km2). The Everglades is both a vast watershed that has historically extended from Lake Okeechobee 100 miles (160 km) south to Florida Bay, and many interconnected ecosystems within a geographic boundary. It is such a unique meeting of water, land, and climate that the use of either singular or plural to refer to the Everglades is appropriate. When Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote her definitive description of the region in 1947, she used the metaphor "River of Grass" to explain the blending of water and plant life.
Pine–cypress forest is a type of mixed conifer woodland in which at least one species of pine and one species of cypress are present. Such forests are noted in several parts of the world, but are particularly well studied in Japan, and the United States.
A cypress dome is a type of freshwater forested wetland, or a swamp, found in the southeastern part of the United States. They are dominated by the Taxodium spp., either the bald cypress, or pond cypress. The name comes from the dome-like shape of treetops, formed by smaller trees growing on the edge where the water is shallow while taller trees grow at the center in deeper water. They usually appear as circular, but if the center is too deep, they form a “doughnut” shape when viewed from above. Cypress domes are characteristically small compared to other swamps, however they can occur at a range of sizes, dependent on the depth.
Florida swamps include a variety of wetland habitats. Because of its high water table, substantial rainfall, and often flat geography, the U.S. state of Florida has a proliferation of swamp areas, some of them unique to the state.
The Southeastern conifer forests are a temperate coniferous forest ecoregion of the southeastern United States. It is the largest conifer forest ecoregion east of the Mississippi River. It is also the southernmost instance of temperate coniferous forest within the Nearctic realm.
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.
