Today as I was driving into work I heard that Florida once again registered large numbers of new residents – “Florida added 321697 residents in 2006”. At this rate we will be adding about three and a quarter million people to the state each new decade. This translates into approximately 1,300.000 new households (i.e., neighborhoods and rooftops and roads – figured at and average of 2.5 people per household). From a Florida wildlife and habitat protection perspective it means less and less open natural landscapes, fewer opportunities for wildfire dependent communities to thrive, greater and greater competition for surface and groundwater nourishment and many more roads and associated road kill and habitat fragmentation.

Florida has many of the same wildlife species as the rest of the nation but also has a mix of distinct species due to its geography as a peninsula that extends south inclusive of both temperate and subtropical climates. Our fauna represent a mix temperate and subtropical adapted species with a growing group of recent exotics that share and compete to sustain their kind with the growing human population. With our ever-greater abilities to reshape and manage natural landscapes we must accept the related responsibilities to be wise stewards of the land, water and the varied intertwined habitats.

This of course this is not news in Florida, it’s just that through the constant and incremental wildlife habitat loss brought about by each new resident, our wildlife are stressed and constrained more, more and a little more again. Species by species, there are limits to adaptability and their abilities to meet the habitat squeeze and loss. Our challenge is to move forward in the face of the continued population growth and craft a Florida where most, if not all, of our wildlife species can be sustained.

A cornerstone tool helping us craft a wildlife friendly Florida is, and hopefully will continue to be, the Florida Forever Program which has allowed us to identify and acquire from willing sellers land and water in sizeable tracts. Given the continuous population growth in the state though, development of other tools will be necessary. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservations Commission’s Wildlife Legacy Initiative accentuates this point and emphasizes that we must prevent wildlife not only from becoming threatened or endangered but we must craft strategies to keep common species common.

A tiered approach to this challenge is developing with large statewide and regional acquisition efforts at the top and many community and even citizen-based efforts below (such as the Florida Yards & Neighborhoods program, run by the University of Florida, and the National Wildlife Federation's Backyard Wildlife Habitat program.). In the middle are a variety of community-based efforts and tools such as:
• Local Community Master planning
• Envisioning/Creating new green infrastructure
• Linking regional parks, green grids and community forests
• Parks and natural green spaces acquisitions (existing and future)
• Greenway linkages (within the particular community and then outward)
• Street trees, canopy roads designations
• Transportation and Stormwater infrastructure examined planned and designed for Wildlife Integration/enhancement opportunities.
• Incorporation of private green areas (golf courses, botanical gardens, easements and set-asides).

From another perspective, the top level habitat protections efforts might be best view through efforts such as Florida Ecological Network Project and the original and hopefully a soon to be updated Closing the Gaps in Florida’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation System.

Lower tiered individual citizen-based efforts might highlighted by a variety of rural good land stewards programs [see: Rural, Agricultural and Silvacultural Lands (Wildlife as a part of our working landscapes)] and the more urban-suburban wildlife friendly yard programs mentioned above.

In the middle tier is the community (i.e., local governmental to large development and neighborhood level). This tier has been less fully defined and articulated relative to means or programs for sustaining wildlife and habitat, even though it is at this level where most of the development approvals are issued (see: Tools for Communities to Use in Wildlife and Habitat Planning). Over the next few years Florida has an opportunity to become a leader in this area as there is nothing like the pressure of a new development to challenge the creative juices. I hope we can rise to challenge.