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.
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.
Picayune Strand State Forest is one of 37 state forests in Florida managed by the Florida Forest Service. The 78,000-acre forest consists primarily of cypress swamps, wet pine flatwoods and wet prairies. It also features a grid of closed roads over part of it, left over from previous land development schemes.
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.
State Road 29 is a state highway that runs north–south through Southwest Florida. A rural road, it runs mostly through uninhabited farmland in its northern half, and along wetlands in its southern half.
The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge is a 402,000‑acre (1,627 km2) National Wildlife Refuge located in Charlton, Ware, and Clinch Counties of Georgia, and Baker County in Florida, United States. The refuge is administered from offices in Folkston, Georgia. The refuge was established in 1937 to protect a majority of the 438,000 acre (1,772 km2) Okefenokee Swamp. Though often translated as "land of trembling earth", the name "Okefenokee" is likely derived from Hitchiti oki fanôːki "bubbling water".
The Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge is a 152,000-acre (620 km2) National Wildlife Refuge located in eastern North Carolina along the Atlantic Coast. It was established on March 14, 1984, to preserve and protect a unique wetland habitat type—the pocosin—and its associated wildlife 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. In the 1970s, an estimated 20 Florida panthers remained in the wild.
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 Key West National Wildlife Refuge is a 189,497 acre (766.867 km2) National Wildlife Refuge located in Monroe County, Florida, between Key West, Florida and the Dry Tortugas. Only 2,019 acres (8.171 km2) of land are above sea level, on several keys within the refuge. These keys are unpopulated and are also designated as Wilderness within the Florida Keys Wilderness. The refuge was established to provide a preserve and breeding ground for native birds and other wildlife as well as to provide habitat and protection for endangered and threatened fish, wildlife, plants and migratory birds.
Copeland is an unincorporated community located in eastern Collier County, Florida, United States. It lies at the junction of State Road 29 and Janes Memorial Scenic Drive. Copeland lies along the western border of the Big Cypress National Preserve, and wedged beside the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park to the east. The hamlet of Jerome is a few miles to the north, while Carnestown lies a few miles to the south at the intersection of State Road 29 and U.S. Route 41. Copeland is part of the Naples–Marco Island Metropolitan Statistical Area.
There are a number of environmental issues in Florida. A large portion of Florida is a biologically diverse ecosystem, with large wetlands in the Everglades. Management of environmental issues related to the everglades and the larger coastal waters and wetlands have been important to the history of Florida and the development of multiple parts of the economy of Florida, including the influential agricultural industry. This biodiversity leaves much of Florida's ecological ecosystem vulnerable to invasive species and human sources of industrial pollution and waste.
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.
An ongoing effort to remedy damage inflicted during the 20th century on the Everglades, a region of tropical wetlands in southern Florida, is the most expensive and comprehensive environmental repair attempt in history. The degradation of the Everglades became an issue in the United States in the early 1970s after a proposal to construct an airport in the Big Cypress Swamp. Studies indicated the airport would have destroyed the ecosystem in South Florida and Everglades National Park. After decades of destructive practices, both state and federal agencies are looking for ways to balance the needs of the natural environment in South Florida with urban and agricultural centers that have recently and rapidly grown in and near the Everglades.
Lake Ophelia National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1988 to protect the Mississippi/Red River floodplain ecosystem. The refuge is located in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, east central Louisiana. The refuge is named for its most prominent water body, the 350-acre (1.4 km2) Lake Ophelia that was at one time a channel of the nearby Red River of the South.
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.
The Naples Zoo is a 43-acre zoo and historic botanical garden in Naples, Florida, United States. The first plantings were made by botanist and ornithologist Henry Nehrling in 1919; the gardens were neglected after his death in 1929. In the 1950s, Julius Fleischmann added new plantings, created lakes and a pathway, introduced parrots and waterfowl, and opened as Caribbean Gardens in 1954. After his death in 1968, the exotic animals were introduced in 1969 by Larry and Jane Tetzlaff, aka Jungle Larry and Safari Jane.
A strand swamp or strand is a type of swamp in Florida that forms a linear drainage channel on flatlands. A forested wetland ecological habitat, strands occur on land areas with high water tables where the lack of slope prevents stream formation. Strands are more linear than the cypress dome swamps that form in more rounded depressions and are fairly similar to floodplain swamps that form further north along streams and rivers.
Big Cypress is a future planned town in Collier County, Florida. The project, originally called Rural Lands West, is being developed by Collier Enterprises and will consist of three villages, Rivergrass, Longwater, and Bellmar.
