Liguus tree snail
Florida is a haven of biodiversity, with 81 distinct biological communities. It’s one of the best reasons to hike in Florida: an ever-changing landscape.
At Florida’s southern tip, trees indigenous to the Caribbean grow in thick, tangled jungles, and endemic tree snails creep slowly up the limbs of smooth-barked trees. At Florida’s northern border, you’ll find trillium and columbines in bloom each spring, and rhododendron and mountain laurel nodding over the banks of clear sand-bottomed streams. Between them, 81 different native plant communities flourish. All this in less than 400 feet of difference in elevation! Unlike our neighbors to the north, Florida is relatively flat, with a high point of only 345 feet and a low point of sea level. Of its 58,560 square miles, nearly 10% are covered with water. Yet just a few inches of elevation change brings about dramatic changes in Florida’s habitats.
One of the greatest joys of hiking in Florida is immersing in the variety of habitats found across our vast state. From the bluffs and ravines of the Panhandle to the tropical hammocks and coastal berms of the Keys, you won’t run out of interesting and unique places to explore. Here are general descriptions of some of the major habitats you’ll encounter while hiking in Florida. For more information, you can download the Florida Natural Areas Inventory Natural Communities guide to obtain the full, detailed list of all 81 Florida habitats!
Coastal Habitats
With more than 1,200 miles of coastline, Florida’s habitats include many communities adapted to life along the sea, where wind and salt spray shape the environment. Coastal dunes are created by the wind. Tall deep-rooted grasses, providing stripes of shade for the burrows of crabs and mice, anchor the sparkling dunes. In the maritime, or [...]
Forests
Hammock is a catchall Florida term for a dense forest that is not a pine flatwoods, and can be made up of oaks, cabbage palms, or oaks with mixed hardwoods like holly, southern magnolia, and elm. Hardwood hammock describes a forest of mixed hardwoods. In North Florida and Northwest Florida, you’ll walk through river bluff [...]
Prairies
Florida’s prairies come in two flavors: dry and wet. Just like the prairies of the Midwest, these prairies are treeless and open grasslands, many of which are seasonally inundated with water. Wildflowers like deer’s-tongue, blazing star, and pine lily thrive here, lending color to the grasslands year-round. Prairies may contain islands of hammocks, or may [...]
Scrub
Florida’s desert, the scrub, forms on well-drained, loose “sugar sand,” deposited along ancient shorelines. They are thought to be Florida’s oldest plant communities, in existence for more than twenty million years. A limited number of plants tolerate the extreme dryness of the scrub environment. In a sand pine scrub, tall sand pines dominate the forest, [...]
Wetlands
Red maple, sweetgum, red bay, bay magnolia, loblolly bay, and water oak are common residents of the floodplain forest, created by rivers that seasonally overflow their banks, scouring adjoining channels higher than the normal river level. Thick with bald cypress, pond cypress, and cabbage palms, the low-lying hydric hammock occurs along river and lake floodplains, [...]
