Native Habitat Inventory Final Report 2004 - St. Lucie County

first created. Then a current 2002 land cover was created. For each coverage, all
polygons (more than 132,000) were classified as natural or non-natural. The difference
between these two coverages provided the acres of natural habitat lost and the number of
acres conserved over the time period.
By 2002, 19,417 acres of land had been conserved. However, in comparison to the
surrounding counties this is quite low (Table 2). Also, the natural areas that remain are
highly fragmented.
Table 2. Comparison of Area Preserved by County as of December 2003
Source: FNAI Managed Areas shapefile December 2003
County Total Acres within
the County
Total Acres
Conserved
Percent of the
County Conserved
St. Lucie 391,700 19,417 5
Indian River 318,080 >100,000 31
Okeechobee 493,440 >75,000 15
Martin 355,200 >66,000 19
Site Data Summaries
The County ESL Program goals of increasing acreage of native habitat preserved as well
as preservation of unique communities and species requires the use of both countywide
and more site-specific, localized ecological information to make wise land-use and land
planning decisions. This need for site-specific information was the basis for conducting
this inventory.
The 30 sites (40,142 acres) that were surveyed represented different vegetative
communities and locations in the County. The vegetative communities of the sites
ranged from coastal uplands to wet flatlands. The sites ranged in size from 1 acre to
28,789 acres. Table 3 provides a summary of the ecological characteristics including
content and context for all the sites. Figure 1 provides a map of the A, B, and C-ranked
sites.
Four sites (4, 9, 43, and 44) were not accessible by ground due to constraints of owner
access (31,499 acres). They were assessed via helicopter by county staff. All four of these
sites are expected to be of high quality based on other data sources (e.g., Fernauld 1989,
Johnson and Muller 1990, KBN 1992) and the aerial reconnaissance.
In the eastern third of the county the natural resources on a site were most affected by
development, whereas, in the western two-thirds of the county they were influenced by
intensive agriculture (e.g., cattle grazing and citrus groves). This is true for both uplands
and wetlands. Agricultural activities directly impact an area by replacing or removing the
overstory, removing small scale topographic variation, collapsing the original
multilayered vegetation structure into fewer layers, altering species richness and
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