How Varied Sizes of Florida Forever Lands in Volusia County Affect Connectivity

How varied sizes of Florida Forever lands in Volusia County affect connectivity A PAPER SUBMITTED FOR THE COMPLETION OF SENIOR FOR THE COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE Stetson University BY Daylan Ware IN PARTIAL FULLIFILLIMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE(S) OF BACHELOR OF SCIENCE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND BACHELOR OF SCIENCE GEOGRAPHY ADVISOR Dr. J. Anthony Abbott, Ph.D. MAY 2016 ii Table of Contents Introduction (p7-8.) Literature Review (p.8-10) Study Area (p.10-11) Methodology (p.11-13) Observation and Data Analysis (p.13-14) Conclusion and Discussion (p.14-15) Figures and Table (p.15-24) Works Cited (p.25-26) iii Table of Illustration Figure1- p.19 Figure 2-p.20 Figure 3- p.21 Figure 4-p.22 Figure 5- p.23 Figure 6- p.24 iv Table of Tables Table 1- p.16 Table 2- p.17-18 v Acknowledgments At this moment I would like thank those who help me throughout this research. My first acknowledgement goes to William Henderson, who helped me with the policy and data attainment side of my project. My second acknowledgement goes to my fellow classmates who helped to fine-tune my work throughout the year in rigorous peer review sessions. My third and final acknowledgement goes out my advisor, Dr.Abbott, we met numerous times over the previous and current semester to ensure the success of my project. vi Abstract Conservation lands are bought in all shapes and sizes and serve a diverse function in Volusia County and anywhere else they exist. How big or small the land is very important in determining what function or usage the land can serve. In my research I analyzed the conservation lands bought through the Florida Forever program in Volusia County to other conservation lands in Volusia County. Through the analysis I was able to discover that there is indeed a correlation between larger conservation lands (over 500 acres) having better connectivity than smaller conservation lands (under 500 acres). A majority of the smaller conservation lands serve as parks and are mainly used for recreational purposes, while the larger lands usually aid as more connectivity tracts of forest to help increase connectivity between larger previous bought conservation lands and serve as more of a benefit to wildlife protection and preserve current natural habitats. vii Introduction In July of 2001 the state of Florida and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection teamed up to create a specialized land acquisition program to strengthen the state’s wildlife corridor and expand the amount of the conservation lands throughout the state. Strong wildlife corridors, which consist of conservation lands connecting previously unconnected conservation or natural lands to one another creates connectivity. When conservation lands are not being connected and are surrounded by anthropogenic features like highways and housing complexes, fragmentation occurs (Dixon 2007). Fragmentation is bad for a variety of reasons, the two main reasons being species and habitat isolation (Cox 1994). When conservation lands are not connecting they are isolated , which is due to being surrounded by non-conservation lands. As a result species and habitats also become isolated. Often this isolation will led animals to find similar habitats or other conservation lands, but since the surrounding areas are often anthropogenic or non-green spaces it is challenging and in many cases dangerous for the animals to find the other isolated lands. An animal crossing the highway is a very real and dangerous example of what occurs because of fragmentation and habitat isolation. The intention of my research was to see how well the Florida Forever program intensified the wildlife corridor locally. Volusia County is very rural for the most part and has a dense wildlife corridor with lots of green space. I wanted to focus on how the Florida Forever program helped improved connectivity of these previously obtained viii conservation lands within the county. Florida Forever lasted about 8 years and spent about 2.9 billion throughout the state, the largest land attainment program since Preservation 2000 (a similar land attainment program funded by the state in the 1990s) (Oetting 2006). Increasing connectivity is a key to eliminating the concern of fragmentation, which creates species and habitat isolation. Seeing how the Florida Forever conservation lands helped solved this issue within the county is an important discovery I find in my results. Literature Review- Most of the literature I utilized for this project revolved around three major topics; policy framework and reasoning for the Florida Forever program, scientific articles, and semi similar experiments and research on measuring the wild life corridor of different areas of Florida. The articles on Florida Forever really helped to explain the how the creation of Florida Forever started and how the state and Department of Environmental Protection decided on what lands to buy for the program. I found and read a number of different scientific articles however they mostly consisted of discussions explaining the pros of connectivity and cons of fragmentation on the environment. Although conservation land is protected and can’t be developed on initially, the change can come faster than you expect. Unless the land is federally protected the local government can strip conservation status and re-zone the land for another purpose such as ix industrial, residential, etc. Ever since the change to the Growth Management Act, local governments were responsible for controlling the impact of growth. Growth and development especially over the past 50 years in the state has really taken a negative toll on the Florida Wildlife corridor (Thaxton 1998). (Reference figure 6) Originally Florida Forever purpose was to increase conservation land in the state and improve the wildlife corridor. However its secondary purpose of creation was as a response to Florida’s rapid growth in terms of population and frequent land change of undeveloped natural lands to developed anthropogenic lands (Root 1998) . Most articles bombast about how unique this program is as its very uncommon to see both the state and local governments collaborate to conserve land. Similar regulations have local governments just receiving funds or taking orders from the state government. The Growth Management Act (GMA) is mentioned frequently in my literature and how it laid the foundation for the state government to provide incentives to the local governments for preserving regional water supplies and water recharge areas (Bunn 2000). One particular academic study I found interesting was about the advantages and disadvantages to land conservation. It discussed how land conservation could be economically viable for a variety of reasons. Although in most cases economic and environmental issues conflict, this article focused specifically on how land conservation could be economical in terms of protecting water quality and allowing species to flourish in green space (Kreye 2013). Natural land also acts as a great environmental filter for x water as opposed to treating it all chemically this natural method is significantly cheaper. Allowing animal species population to live comfortable with in the lands also is much easier than try save the species when it becomes endangered also. Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI) worked very closely with the state and DEP on what lands should be bought through the funding of Florida Forever. They used a ranking system to determine which properties of land needed to be preserved verse what could remain up for public sale (Documentation 2009). The ranking system is known as F-TRAC or the Florida Forever Tool for Efficient Resource Acquisition and Conservation. This tool which was really a complex computerized land analysis consisted of lots of factors but some to highlight would be landscape size, landscape type, animal species diversity, connectivity, and if it’s on or how close it is to wetlands (FNAI 2014). Although there is plenty of literature supporting the benefits of connectivity and negatives of fragmentation there is not much locally on the subject here in Volusia County. Another reason I wanted to stay local and allow for the spotlight to be brought upon this issue. Volusia County has plenty of conservation land that received a boost in connectivity due to the Florida Forever program. Specialized habitats like the Florida scrub and native Florida species like the black bear are devastated by fragmentation (Forman 2012) Study Area- The area of study where my research will occur is throughout Volusia County, located in the central region of the state of Florida. I chose Volusia County as it’s our local county xi but also because a study like the one I have performed has not occurred in this area yet. Conservation lands set aside by the Florida Forever program in the county is where I will specifically looking at for my research and are the main areas of focus. The land areas I have chosen is relevant to my research because it is in these areas where I will perform my map analysis to measure connectivity to see if fragmentation has been reduced in Volusia County because of the Florida Forever program. Methodology- In my experiment, I used the Environmental System Research Institution (ESRI) mapping software of GIS to perform an analysis of Florida Forever conservation land by size and connectivity. Essentially I tested how different conservation lands serve as either a connectivity track to bring other conservation lands together or if the land is just isolated and being conserved as a park more so for human purposes then environmental protection or natural green space. The data I gathered is from 2 main sources: Volusia County public GIS records and the Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI). Volusia County had a very recent layer file (updated in February of 2016) of the conservation lands in Volusia County. Using this file I was able to locate and identify the wildlife corridor, the file name was ConservationLands. Also from the County’s GIS database I used the cities shape file to give the map a base and show the outline of Volusia County. Downloading and getting access to these shape files was very easy, convenient and free. If you go to http://www.volusia.org/gis/download/Shapes.htm there xii will be a list of files and this were you can download the county data. The second website where I gathered my data from was the Florida Natural Areas Inventory , this is where I obtained the shape files for the Florida Forever conservation lands to determine how effective their connectivity was within Volusia County. The name of the shape was FloridaForeverAcquisitions and just like the county data it was easy, convenient, and free, it can be downloaded with ease from http://fnai.org/gisdata.cfm. I will be splitting and testing two groups of land, conservation properties smaller than five hundred acres, as well as conservation lands that are larger than five hundred acres. I chose 500 acres because it’s a median property size between the largest and smallest Florida Forever land size. I am predicting that if the Florida Forever properties are less than five hundred acres, then they will be less connectivity to other previously bought conservation lands and should be more isolated than the larger properties of five hundred acres or more. In order to discover the connectivity, I have identified key points on the map where large tracts of previous conservation land existed (multiple patches of conservation land clustered together). I then selected the acquired Florida Forever lands and established if the land either boosted connectivity by connecting different areas of conservation land to one another or if the land was isolated by being surrounded by non-conservation land. After performing the map analysis I then took a percentage of lands with connectivity/lands without connectivity, of the larger Florida Forever lands and xiii smaller Florida Forever lands then compared there functionality. In an additional study I will see if these Florida Forever Lands were originally bought as large pieces of land or if they were bought as a multiple smaller properties that were then combined to become a larger 500 plus acre property. I preformed the same analysis on general conservation lands in Volusia County also to see what the lands were like before (what size the parcel of lands were) before they were bought through the Florida Forever Program. Observation and Data Analysis- There are a total of thirty-eight Florida forever conservation properties in Volusia County. Ten of them are 500+ acres while the other twenty-eight are not. Eighteen of the smaller Florida Forever lands have connectivity properties and are attached to other conservation lands. The other ten were isolated and mainly serve a recreation area or aren’t benefiting conservation land via connectivity purposes due to the fact non-conservation lands surround them. Through the map analysis I was able to validate my hypothesis as only 64.3% of smaller Florida Conservation lands are used for connectivity while 100% of the larger conservation (all 10 properties) lands were connected to other conservation land. Overall the Florida Forever properties helped Volusia County’s wildlife corridor as 73% of the lands acquired by the program helped boost connectivity. There are a total of 3,473 conservation land parcels in Volusia County. I split the conservation land parcels into two groups for this analysis, a large group which was any conservation land over 500 acres and a smaller group of conservation lands which was xiv any land under 500 acres. There are 173 conservation land properties over 500 acres and 3,300 that are smaller than 500. A majority of the smaller Florida Forever lands were isolated smaller parks scattered throughout the county. Some of the smaller properties that were on the larger side (200-499 acres) were indeed used for connectivity tract purposes but an astounding 68.8% (2,274/3,300) of the smaller properties are managed by Volusia County Parks and Recreation and used On the reverse side of the experiment of the 173 larger properties only 7.5% were owned by the Parks department. An interesting trend I noticed is that a lot of the larger Florida Forever properties were made from several smaller properties, than were turned into a larger property. Kechmo, one of the conservation properties critical as it acts as a connectivity corridor to bring two large conservation lands together was initially bought as many small parcels. After combining these parcels they create one large conservation land parcel over 500 acres. Conclusion and Discussion- Completing this experiment was important to me because I think understanding the usage of our current conservation lands function by size is important to determine how we buy and use future conservation lands. After the completion of this experiment a major result that should be taken away from this experiment is that currently large Florida Forever lands were created and formed by buying numerous smaller conservation lands that came together to create huge conservation corridors. A method that was an effective xv and efficient way to increase connectivity amongst conservation land is to buy lots smaller connected properties bunched up near one another and then turn them into larger connectivity tracts. The Florida Forever program did a wonderful job at achieving this as a strong majority of their current 500+ acre properties were purchased as many small conservation lands that were merged together. In my hypothesis I stated that I believed that lager conservation lands would be used more for connectivity purposes than anything else. The completion of my experiment proved that my guess was indeed correct. My logic for saying that the properties that were 500+ acres would serve as mostly connectivity corridors for wild life is because 500+ acres of land is sustainable amount of land. Large species of land like that would only best be used to help enlarge or connect previous conservation lands. Smaller lands make sense how and why they would be used for parks. I am not stating that small lands cannot be used for connectivity purposes but I would say a majority of small conservation lands aren’t used for that purpose and serve as more of a recreational or isolated property that doesn’t really contain the connectivity factors. For my secondary cost analysis I did not predict any treads in prices amongst the lands. What I discovered is that there was not really any price trend for the lands. The initial thought was if land was bought in numerous parcels than it would be cheaper; however this was not the case. I think the rational leading to this is that ultimately property is all about the location it is. Properties closer to the water surround by non- xvi green space were more pricey than lands that were centrally located in the county surrounded by nothing but conservation lands. Figures and Tables- Florida Forever land >500 acres parcel name Connectivity (Yes/No) Acreage Marvin Kelley Fore Yes 7278.916674 acres Plum Creek/Volusia Parcel 4 Yes 6940.97897 acres Plum Creek/Volusia Parcel 5&6 Yes 7278.916674 acres Norman Fore Yes 816.799499 acres Timberlands Consolidated Yes 1045.492724 acres Le Fils Yes 1710.016859 acres Volusia County Yes 1527.920299 acres David Strawn Lands, Inc. Yes 1132.714614 acres Kemcho - formerly American Timberlands Yes 3197.619399 acres Maytown Tract Yes 3319.20389 acres Table 1- This table shows data for the larger properties which was used in the analysis. xvii Florida Forever land <500 acres parcel name Connectivity (Yes/No) Acreage Volusia Conservation Corridor I Yes 466.235385 acres Volusia Conservation Corridor II Yes 25.765357 acres Heart Island Conservation Area Yes 372.934433 acres Three Chimneys No 7.597784 acres FFS/Tiger Bay State Forest Yes 14.579132 acres DRP/Bulow Creek I Yes 0.245927 acres DRP/Bulow Creek II Yes 0.316553 acres DRP/DeLeon Springs Yes 7.174696 acres DRP/Tomoka State Park Yes 8.606831 acres FFS/Lake George State Forest Yes 38.706257 acres DRP/Bulow Creek Yes 219.060605 acres The Trust for Public Land/Tall Pines Yes 175.051378 acres DRP/North Peninsula State Park Yes 14.884798 acres City of S. Daytona Stormwater- Stevens Canal No 1.038404 acres City of S. Daytona Stormwater- Stevens Canal No 8.327025 acres Ponce Preserve Inlet No 3.202468 acres DRP/De Leon Springs State Park Yes 0.221952 acres Daytona Beach Historic Pier & Boardwalk No 1.954108 acres Doris Leeper Spruce Creek Yes 87.339178 acres xviii Town Center No 0.833682 acres Catholic Diocese Tract Yes 151.331444 acres Town Center Marcantonio No 0.598414 acres Doris Leeper Spruce Creek, Phase III Yes 62.0108 acres Russell Property No 18.099141 acres Timucuan Oaks Botanical Gardens No 8.774803 acres Esther Street Beachfront Park No 1.826946 acres Stanaki Property Yes 227.981126 acres Lake George State Forest Yes 10.86138 acres Table 2- This table shows data for the smaller properties which was used in the analysis. xix Figure 1- All of the current conservation lands in Volusia County (general and Florida Forever properties), the wildlife corridor runs mostly through the northwest and central section of the county. xx Table 2- This map highlights the large conservation properties that were acquired by Florida Forever. xxi Figure 3- This map highlights the small conservation properties that were acquired by Florida Forever, they are the hollow red boxes. xxii Figure 4- This is a zoomed imagine of figure 3, it demonstrations how isolated the smaller Florida Forever properties are. xxiii Figure 5- This map was created for my secondary analysis, it shows how the lands were originally purchased. xxiv Figure 6- A map of the wildlife corridor of the state of Florida, it shows areas where potential Florida Forever lands could be purchased and areas where Florida Forever lands were actually purchased. This map was obtained from floridawildlife.org not created myself. xxv Works Cited Bunn, A. G., D. L. Urban, and T. Keitt. 2000. Landscape connectivity: a conservation application of graph theory. Journal of environmental management 59:265-278. Cox, J., R. Kautz, M. MacLaughlin, and T. Gilbert. 1994. Closing the gaps in Florida’s wildlife habitat conservation system. Office of Environmental Services, Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission, Tallahassee, Florida. Dixon, J. D., M. K. Oli, M. C. Wooten, T. H. Eason, J. W. McCown, and M. W. Cunningham. 2007. Genetic consequences of habitat fragmentation and loss: the case of the Florida black bear (Ursus americanus floridanus). Conservation Genetics 8:455-464. Documentation, M., J. Oetting, A. Knight, and F. N. A. Inventory. 2009. Florida Forever Tool for Efficient Resource Acquisition and Conservation. Forman, R. T., J. P. Beckmann, A. P. Clevenger, M. Huijser, and J. A. Hilty. 2012. Safe passages: highways, wildlife, and habitat connectivity.Island Press. Inventory, F. N. A. 2014. Florida Forever Project Ranking Support Analyses Documentation. Kreye, M. M., F. J. Escobedo, D. C. Adams, T. Stein, and T. Borisova. 2013. Valuing the Ecosystem Services of Florida’s Forest Conservation Programs: The Economic Benefits of Protecting Water Quality1. University of Florida-IFAS, EDIS, FOR 309:. McLeod, A. H., T. Chapin, and C. Coutts. 2011. Florida forever: Conserving land and guiding growth in the sunshine state. Growth management and public land acquisition: Balancing conservation and development. xxvi Oetting, J. B., A. L. Knight, and G. R. Knight. 2006. Systematic reserve design as a dynamic process: F-TRAC and the Florida Forever program. Biological Conservation 128:37-46. Richards, V. P., J. D. Thomas, M. J. Stanhope, and M. S. Shivji. 2007. Genetic connectivity in the Florida reef system: comparative phylogeography of commensal invertebrates with contrasting reproductive strategies. Molecular ecology 16:139-157. Root, K. V. 1998. Evaluating the effects of habitat quality, connectivity, and catastrophes on a threatened species. Ecological Applications 8:854-865. Thaxton, J., and T. Hingtgen. 1996. Effects of suburbanization and habitat fragmentation on Florida Scrub-Jay dispersal. Florida Field Naturalist 24:25-60.