Florida’s environmental statistics span protected land, prescribed fire, wildlife management, water use, coastal monitoring, and flood resilience. The figures below cover several measurement periods, including 2015 water withdrawals, fiscal year 2020–2021 state-park management, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s 2026–2027 resilience plan. Keeping those dates and geographies visible is essential when comparing the numbers.
Contents
- Conservation land and Florida Forever
- Prescribed fire and habitat treatment
- Invasive species and wildlife management
- Sea turtle nesting on state park beaches
- Water withdrawals and reclaimed water
- Water use by sector and district
- Resilience planning and coral reef monitoring
Conservation land and Florida Forever
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Forever materials describe approximately 10 million acres as managed for conservation statewide. The same Florida DEP Florida Forever source says more than 2.6 million acres were purchased through the Florida Forever and Preservation 2000 programs. These are statewide management and acquisition figures, so they describe broad conservation activity rather than one individual park or a single ecosystem.
Florida Forever began in 2000. Since then, more than 1 million acres within Florida Forever projects have been purchased, according to the Florida DEP Florida Forever source. A Florida DEP Florida Forever FAQ gives a more specific program figure of more than 907,412 acres acquired under Florida Forever. Because the two figures come from different Florida DEP materials and use different wording, they are best retained as separate reported measures rather than combined.
Florida DEP describes Florida Forever as one of the largest public land acquisition programs in the United States. The program’s reported scale helps place the acreage numbers in context: Florida’s conservation statistics include both land already managed statewide and land acquired through named acquisition programs.
Prescribed fire and habitat treatment
The Florida Park Service Resource Management Annual Report for fiscal year 2020–2021 records 80,508 acres treated with prescribed fire. That total was 33,882 acres higher than the prior fiscal year and represented a 73% increase. The service conducted 371 prescribed burns during the fiscal year.
Wildfires accounted for 1,734 acres, or 2% of the total acres burned, in the same fiscal-year report. This makes the reported acreage distinction important: the 80,508-acre prescribed-fire figure is a planned management measure, while the wildfire figure records unplanned fire acreage within the report’s accounting.
Of 91 parks with acres planned for prescribed fire, 72 conducted at least one prescribed burn. Forty parks exceeded their minimum ecological target acreages. District five was the only district to meet 100% of its planned prescribed-fire goal. The report also marked 50 years of prescribed fire by the Florida Park Service on May 17, 2021, and recorded the service reaching two million acres burned on June 8, 2021.
One especially large event occurred at Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park on March 31, 2021. The record prescribed fire involved 34 crew members and burned 11,533 acres. The event is a single-park example within a statewide fiscal-year total, not an additional statewide total.
Mechanical treatment was another habitat-management measure. The Florida Park Service mechanically treated 2,204 acres in 24 parks during fiscal year 2020–2021, down 532 acres, or 19%, from the prior year. Mulching or shredding accounted for 602 acres, or 27% of mechanically treated acreage. District three mechanically treated 1,111 acres, about half of the statewide mechanical-treatment total.
Invasive species and wildlife management
During fiscal year 2020–2021, the Florida Park Service treated 9,076 infested acres for invasive plants. Those treatments occurred across 51,958 gross acres. The service reached 100% of its invasive-plant treatment goal for the year, while the number of parks treating invasive plants increased by five parks, or 3%.
The report also lists 46,225 total infested acres division-wide. That division-wide figure is a broader inventory measure than the 9,076 infested acres treated, so the two numbers should not be read as interchangeable. One describes treatment completed during the year; the other describes total infested acreage recorded across the division.
Animal management produced 8,636 invasive and nuisance-animal removals in the fiscal year. Of those, 7,656 were invasive animals and 980 were nuisance native animals. The detailed categories included 3,016 feral hogs removed from 50 state parks, 1,699 invasive fish removed at six state parks, and 581 green iguanas removed.
Feral cat removals fell from 60 to 28 animals in the comparison reported by the Florida Park Service. That change is presented as a count comparison in the annual report; the report’s fiscal-year context should be retained when interpreting it alongside the other removal totals.
Sea turtle nesting on state park beaches
The Florida Park Service coordinated turtle nesting surveys on 101 miles of beach in 40 state parks during fiscal year 2020–2021. State park beaches recorded 6,557 sea turtle nests, an average of 65 nests per mile of surveyed beach.
The report identified different movements among turtle groups: loggerhead nests decreased by 6%, while green turtle nests increased by 3%. These are percentage changes for the named groups, not a stated change in the total of 6,557 nests.
Predation was recorded at a 6% statewide rate on state park beaches. Six parks had predation rates greater than 20%. The report attributes 177 predated nests to coyotes and 107 predated nests to ghost crabs. These predator-specific counts are included within the report’s beach-management accounting and should not be added to the overall nest total.
Water withdrawals and reclaimed water
The USGS report Water Withdrawals, Uses, and Trends in Florida, 2015 recorded total Florida water withdrawals of 15,319 million gallons per day (Mgal/d) in 2015. Saline water accounted for 9,598 Mgal/d, or 63%, while freshwater accounted for 5,721 Mgal/d, or 37%.
Freshwater sources were divided between groundwater and surface water. Groundwater supplied 3,604 Mgal/d, or 63% of freshwater withdrawals, and surface water supplied 2,117 Mgal/d, or 37%. For saline-water withdrawals, surface water supplied 9,401 Mgal/d, or 98%.
Florida used 738 Mgal/d of reclaimed wastewater in 2015. More than three-quarters—83%—of reclaimed wastewater-discharge flow supported urban irrigation, agricultural irrigation, and industrial use. The USGS report also expressed freshwater withdrawals as approximately a 3.5-inch layer of water across Florida’s 54,252 square miles. That freshwater volume was about 7% of Florida’s 2015 rainfall, which averaged 53 inches statewide.
The following figures summarize the main 2015 withdrawal categories reported by USGS:
| Use category | Withdrawals (Mgal/d) |
|---|---|
| Power generation | 9,858.85 |
| Public supply | 2,384.85 |
| Agricultural self-supplied | 2,088.80 |
| Recreational-landscape irrigation | 397.51 |
These categories use the USGS report’s sector labels and measurement units. They should not be confused with the saline-versus-freshwater source split, because a sector total and a source total describe different dimensions of the withdrawal system.
Water use by sector and district
The USGS 2015 figures show how strongly the reported totals vary among Florida’s water management districts. The South Florida Water Management District recorded 5,892.28 Mgal/d, while the Southwest Florida Water Management District recorded 6,145.10 Mgal/d. The St. Johns River Water Management District recorded 2,218.00 Mgal/d, and the Suwannee River Water Management District recorded 357.76 Mgal/d.
| Water management district | Total withdrawals, 2015 (Mgal/d) |
|---|---|
| Southwest Florida | 6,145.10 |
| South Florida | 5,892.28 |
| St. Johns River | 2,218.00 |
| Suwannee River | 357.76 |
The district numbers are geographic totals for 2015, while the sector figures above describe categories of use statewide. Reading them together gives two different views of Florida’s water demand: where withdrawals were reported and what broad use category they served.
Resilience planning and coral reef monitoring
Florida DEP’s 2026–2027 Statewide Flooding and Sea Level Rise Resilience Plan says the resilience program was created in 2021. The 2025 application cycle opened July 7, 2025, and the application portal closed at 11:59 p.m. EDT on September 1, 2025. The plan lists 123 eligible projects for fiscal year 2026–2027, with the top 15 prioritized projects proposed for state funding.
Year 1 funding for those 15 projects totaled $82,039,821. Two multiyear projects added $17,960,179 in Year 1 funding, bringing combined Year 1 funding to $100,000,000. The plan also commits $21,227,592 for fiscal year 2027–2028 and $16,527,500 for fiscal year 2028–2029. It reports total funding of $100,000,000 for Year 2 and $100,000,000 for Year 3.
Florida’s Coral Reef water-quality aggregation project, described in the Florida DEP Coral Reef Water Quality Data Compilation Year 2, identified 93 water-quality monitoring programs. Only five of the 93 programs met all five screening criteria. This is a monitoring-program screening result, not a statewide water-quality rating.
For climate context, NOAA says its 1991–2020 U.S. Climate Normals dataset includes more than 15,000 precipitation stations and more than 7,300 temperature stations. Those station counts describe the national dataset, not Florida alone, and the 1991–2020 period is distinct from the 2015 water-withdrawal measurements and the 2020–2021 park-management results above.