Florida Native Plant Society Blog

FLORIDA NATIVE PLANT SOCIETY PO Box 278 Melbourne, FL 32902 https://www.fnps.org Valerie Anderson, Director of Communications and Programming Phone: 386.852.2539 | Email: communications@fnps.org Florida Native Plant Society Purchases 12.5 Acres to Protect Endangered Species With generous private donations and grant awards from the Felburn Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, the Florida Native Plant Society completed the purchase of 12.5 acres of rare sandhill habitat in Marion County that will help protect the critically endangered plant Clasping warea ( Warea amplexifolia ) and the federally threatened Florida Sand Skink ( Plestiodon reynoldsi ). Marion County is home to the largest population of Clasping Warea and one of the northernmost occurrences of the Florida Sand Skink. In 2014, the Florida Native Plant Society and Putnam Land Conservancy formed a partnership to acquire and preserve an approximately 400 acre corridor of lands to protect rare and endemic ...

 At the edge between the grasslands and an oak/cypress hammock, a lone longleaf pine rises majestically above the grasses. Because I'd donated 50% of my book 's royalties to the Nature Conservancy of Florida, Erica La Spada, a donor coordinator there, invited my husband and me to a private guided tour of the Disney Wilderness Preserve south of Orlando in Kissimmee. Wow! We were impressed with the size (12,000 acres) and with what the Conservancy has done to restore the property from ranchland back to its original status according to the records from the first Spanish missionaries. This site began as a mitigation site to offset the land that was used in the making and expansion of Disney World. Disney has provided an endowment that has allowed the Conservancy to do most of the restoration, and some of the wildlife monitoring. While Disney gave the first 8,000 + acres. An additional 3000 acres came from the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority and a few more small ...