We’re working to permanently connect and conserve the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

Conservation Florida is a dedicated partner in the effort to protect the Florida Wildlife Corridor and helped fund early science and mapping efforts that brought the idea to life.

The corridor contains millions of acres spanning the state and is no longer just a vision of a few conservationists, but a plan for saving land that supports all life, including humans!

HOW? Many organizations (federal, state, and nonprofits) are partnering to piece together large tracts of land that include farms, ranches, and natural habitats to form a corridor of protected lands that spans the entire state. This gives wildlife and native plants a place to live and grow, and gives people fresh food, water, and wonderful recreational lands.

Conservation Florida is on the frontlines of the campaign to permanently protect land within the Florida Wildlife Corridor – and we need your help!

WHY? When future generations look back at the 21st century, they will note that Florida had a chance to do something incredible. Something visionary. They will see that decade after decade the citizens of Florida recognized the importance of land protection and voted time after time to protect its wild places, wildlife, and freshwater resources. A turning point in the long history of land protection in our state was with the landmark, bipartisan passage of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act in 2021. 

The Florida Wildlife Corridor provides a vision for Florida as a whole that protects the places we all love, offers habitat and room to roam for our native species, cleans and stores water, provides ample outdoor recreational opportunity, and supports Florida’s family farms and ranches – all while accounting for Florida’s future growth.

As Florida’s population booms, new roads, housing developments, and shopping centers fragment natural ecosystems. Poorly planned expansion of cities cut off the natural and necessary movement of wildlife between conservation lands.

Of this 17.7 million acre landscape, 8.1 million acres have an opportunity to be conserved. The future of Florida depends on the decisions we make today.

Florida is renowned for its wildlife and for the wild places they call home.

Generations of Floridians have worked to conserve some of the very best of these landscapes to ensure that the state remains a hotspot for biodiversity, clean drinking water, and outdoor recreation. Successes abound from the panhandle to the Everglades, but it’s not enough to just preserve islands of habitat – we have to connect them. Animals like panthers and black bears require large, connected areas to roam in between core protected areas, and ecosystems need space to shift in response to sea-level rise and climate change. That’s why Conservation Florida is working to protect the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

The Florida Wildlife Corridor is a vision of connected and protected lands spanning the state. The corridor is composed of core protected areas, like state parks and national forests, and opportunity areas which are made up of both wild and working lands.

Working lands include farms, ranches, and timberlands. Both natural and working lands are key to the future of Florida’s wildlife corridor. Working lands often provide the connection that allow wildlife to migrate from one region to another and provide critical habitat.

Conservation Florida is working across the state to protect these connective areas by helping farmers and ranchers secure their working lands from development, ensuring that they’ll remain in agricultural production, and continue to offer pathways and habitat for wildlife into the future.

Our role: we’re saving land.

From Pensacola to the Florida Keys, our work creates, expands, and links conservation lands. 

Conservation Florida is a proud founding and leading partner in the effort to protect the Florida Wildlife Corridor. We are engaging landowners and a wide variety of partners to protect critical properties and make the corridor vision a reality. 

We’re prioritizing partnership and mobilization to ramp up our pace.

The Florida Wildlife Corridor vision is built on decades of work by scientists and conservation organizations that determined the need for landscape-scale conservation approaches – and specifically corridors – as a way to address habitat loss and fragmentation across Florida. These efforts, spearheaded by Larry Harris and Reed Noss at the University of Florida in the 1980s, brought about the Florida Ecological Greenways Network (FEGN) – an incredibly ambitious conservation plan. This research and mapping provides the scientific foundation for the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

Under the leadership of Dr. Tom Hoctor, the FEGN was updated again in 2021. The statewide database continues to identify and prioritize a functionally connected wildlife corridor, consisting of public and private conservation lands.

While the FEGN 1-3 provides the scientific foundation of the corridor, the FEGN is also the primary data layer used to inform Florida Forever, Rural and Family Lands Protection Program, and other state, federal, and regional land acquisition programs.

Conservation Florida is proud to have played a role over the decades, and continues to utilize science to drive our conservation efforts.