Ocala National Forest: Silver Springs and the Big Scrub

The Ocala National Forest, between the Saint Johns River and the Oklawaha River in north-central Florida, contains something geographically improbable: the largest sand pine scrub ecosystem in the world. The Big Scrub, as locals have called this terrain for generations, is a dry, white-sand landscape of stunted sand pines, scrub oaks, and ground-level plants adapted to near-drought conditions, sitting surrounded by the subtropical wetlands and hammock forests that most people picture when they think of Florida. It is an island ecosystem, and like most islands, its plants and animals evolved toward specialization.

The Florida scrub-jay, found nowhere in the world except Florida's sand scrub habitat, lives in the Ocala forest and is listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. It is one of the few animals that lives only in Florida, evolved to a specific soil type and vegetation structure that fire maintains and development eliminates.

Silver Springs, at the forest's southern edge, was one of the most visited tourist destinations in the American South for most of the twentieth century. The springs are among the largest artesian springs in the world, with a constant seventy-two-degree temperature and a clarity so extreme that early glass-bottomed boat tours, operating since the eighteen seventies, could see objects on the spring floor twenty feet below with perfect resolution. Tarzan films were shot in the springs in the nineteen thirties and forties. The glass-bottomed boats are still running. Silver Springs became a Florida state park in two thousand thirteen.

The state of Florida has worked to restore scrub habitat in the Ocala forest through controlled burning. Fire, which the forest suppressed for most of the twentieth century, turns out to be what kept the scrub alive.