Ecology of South Florida (EVR 3013) LECTURE 27
CONSERVATION IN SOUTHERN FLORIDA
MY FLORIDA
My Florida is the inundated prairie dotted by lonesome cabbage palm hammocks, cypress islands and bayheads, with an undulating flock of egrets like galloping white horses in the distance.
My Florida is the pine, palmetto and wire grass woods, where the bees go from the penny-royal to the wild honeysuckle and the placid gopher tortoise walks on its stubby legs, stretching out time.
My Florida is the little spruce trees on the white sugar of rolling dunes, leaning the way the wind has blown them, with the gray lichens below and the nests if flying squirrels in their branches. It is scrub-oaks covered with orange love-vines and a saucy towhee scratching. It is not a well-manicured lawn joining on to the lawn of a neighbor, and then more lawns joining lawns, all neat and orderly and characterless.
My Florida is the winding tropical river, heavy with the musky scent of palm blossoms, with water turkeys sunning themselves, striped necked turtles plopping from logs, grey squirrels barking and the rat-tat-tat of the pileated woodpecker resounding. It is not a CBS [concrete-block-stucco], all electric ... home.
My Florida is the tarpon rolling, the mullet leaping for fun, pelicans diving, red-beaked water skimmer gulls skimming the surface with their bills, a manatee blowing, an eagle stealing fish from an osprey high in the air. It is not a four-lane highway.
My Florida is the strangling fig tree swallowing a palm, shoestring ferns in the hammock's shade, wild orchids, Spanish moss and crimson-flowered airplants. It is not a Washingtonia palm tree in a parking planting, or a hibiscus bush.
My Florida is squatty custard apple trees and moon vines-and "watch out for that moccasin!" .. It is not pink-kneed vacationers in sun glasses and Bermuda shorts.
My Florida is going fast.
Ernest Lyons (p. 19-22)
I. STATUS OF CONSERVATION IN SOUTHERN FLORIDA
A. Is there really a problem?
- Biscayne Bay is cleaner than it was 20 years ago.
- Many parcels of Dade County lands have been purchased for protection.
- Public transportation is being developed
- Large areas in southern Florida have been preserved:
- Big Cypress National Preserve
- Biscayne National Park
- Everglades National Park
- Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve
- Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge
- Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve
B. Biological principles
1. Carrying capacity
2. Limiting factors
C. Applications to southern Florida
1. What is the carrying capacity?
2. What are the limiting factors?
II. DEFINITIONS
A. Conservation
- based on servare: to keep, guard, observe. scientific management of resources
B. Preservation
- based on servare: to keep, guard, observe. limiting human impact on resources
C. Should we preserve or conserve?
III. ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS IN SOUTHERN FLORIDA
A. Threatened communities
1. Pine rockland
2. Pine scrub
3. Hammocks
B. Threatened animals
1. Panther
2. Manatee
3. Bear
4. Wood stork
5. Bald eagle
6. Sandhill crane
7. Red-cockaded woodpecker
8. Scrub jay
9. Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow
10. American crocodile
11. Atlantic hawksbill
12. Atlantic Ridley turtle
13. Leatherback
14. Indigo snake
15. Loggerhead
16. Alligator
17. Pine barren tree frog
18. Gopher tortoise
C. Threatened plants
1. Asimina tetramera
2. Asplenium serratum
3. Asplenium dentatum
4. Cocothrinax argentata
5. Encyclia bothiana
6. Ophioglossum palmatum
7. Polygala smallii
8. Tillandsia flexuosa
9. Zamia floridana
10. Roystonea elata
D. Altered Processes
1. Fire
2. Water
3. Exotics
4. Fragmentation
5. Pollution
IV. M.S. DOUGLAS
More and more such people are starting up in a rising chorus of protest against the destruction of the beauties of our great natural heritage which, if lost, would help ruin the whole nature of the state. I saw twelve men, Lloyd Miller, Philip Wylie, William Lazarus, James Redford and the rest, with one indomitable woman, Belle Scheffel, defeat the county's plans, approved by practically all the public, to allow an oil refinery and deep-sea tanker port to ruin lower Biscayne Bay ... Within all this tropical country of south Florida lie the ancient Everglades. I saw them as they were once, almost untouched. The first ill-considered drainage canals had been dug. I saw the changes come, urged by politicians and land speculators, that would threaten to destroy them and their marvelous supply of freshwater. I knew the man who began in 1920 to try to save at least a part of their strangeness and beauty, as the Everglades National Park.
Florida: the Long Frontier
Back to start, Back to lecture 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26
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