A unique resident of North Key Largo is endemic, meaning that it is found in the wild only here and nowhere else in the world. A large portion of this area where the endangered Key Largo woodrat lives includes Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park.

In this installment of the Biologist Tells the Story series, you'll meet Maulik Patel, environmental specialist at Collier-Seminole State Park. His efforts managing the natural resources at the park include using prescribed fire, controlling invasive plants and animals, and controlling the flow of water through the park.

Annual entrance passes can be purchased at all park ranger stations and museums. If you require immediate use of your pass, this is the best option. Passes can be purchased during regular business hours 365 days a year.

Park staff applied prescribed fire to 15 acres of wet flatwoods to expand a small population of rare hooded pitcher plants, a carnivorous plant native to Florida.

Who can you find scurrying among the sacred vegetation of the park’s coastal dunes? Why the endangered Anastasia Island Beach Mouse! Marked with a light buff colored back, pure white underparts, and indistinct white markings on their face, this adorable creature has become this park’s unofficial mascot.

Although sinkholes are common in Florida, Devil’s Millhopper is unique because it is one of the few places in Florida where more than 100 feet of geologic rock layers are exposed. The park is also unique because it is an important and beautiful example of how ecosystems develop in response to geological features. 

Gardens are places where the spontaneity of nature and the order of design balance to create living art. The gardens within Florida State Parks are some of the best treasures of the state.

Florida’s wild places are time machines to a Florida before development. Scattered throughout the state, they represent the original Florida, places of discovery and where you can reconnect with yourself.

Experience Florida as it was before interstates, high-rises and air conditioning. Florida State Parks preserve and share the story of the state and its people through many historical and cultural sites.

Florida is truly a place where land and water interweaves to form a diverse and dynamic natural fabric. Numerous rivers course through the landscape, and lakes of varying sizes can be found in all regions.

Silver Springs offers one of Florida’s premier views of clear groundwater flowing to land surface and an excellent example of the connection between rocks and water over geologic time. More than 30 springs that have been documented in the upper part of the Silver River. 

O’Leno State Park is one of the few places in Florida where a river disappears underground and reappears a few miles away. Within the park, the Santa Fe River flows underground via Santa Fe River Sink, becoming part of the Floridan aquifer system. 

Rock Bluff is a steep, tall limestone bluff within Torreya State Park that has been exposed by erosional activity of the Apalachicola River. As this large river moves across the landscape, it erodes the underlying rocks creating the broad valley it occupies. 

Falling Waters State Park is the only place in Florida where visitors can see a 70-foot-tall waterfall! When there is sufficient rainfall, surface water cascades over the rim of a large, circular depression before disappearing into a cave.

Windley Key Fossil Reef Geological State Park provides a beautiful exposure of a geological unit known as the Key Largo Limestone. Fossil corals and other ancient marine life are preserved in these rocks and record a unique part of Florida’s geologic history.

Wakulla Spring is located in a region known as the Woodville Karst Plain because the area contains numerous springs, sinkholes and submerged cave systems formed by the dissolving of limestone over thousands to millions of years.