 Pine rocklands grow on the coastal Miami Rock Ridge, a limestone rock outcropping that extends south and west from North Miami Beach to Long Pine Key in Everglades National Park. Over 225 types of native plants occur here and more than 20% of the plant species are found here and nowhere else in the world. Five of these plant species are federally listed as threatened or endangered.
The dominant slash pines tower above a savanna like understory of saw palmettos, beauty berries, willow bustic, locust berries, broom grasses and silver palms. A rich diversity of small herbaceous plants such as the ant pollinated deltoid spurge, the purple flowered milk pea, and the tiny yellow-green small’s milkwork are found nowhere else in the world.
Wildlife such as the rare Florida panther use the understory as camouflage in areas such as Everglades National Park, and red-shoulder hawks rest on dead slash pine stubs as they hunt pygmy rattles. Atala butterflies feed on native coontie as palm warblers flit between branches in search of insects.
A disappearing habitat…
Pine Rocklands occur only in South Florida, the Florida Keys, and some islands of the Bahamas. These pinelands, interspersed with hardwood hammocks, once covered 185,000 acres of Miami-Dade County. By the time the city of Miami celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1996, only 2% of the pine forest remained within the urbanized areas of the County and outside of the protective border of Everglades National Park.
The rest of the forest has been broken into fragments. From the air, the pinelands appear scattered across Miami-Dade's industrial, residential, and agricultural landscape, looking less like a forest than like islands of trees in a sea of urbanization.
A unique plant community, Rockridge pinelands have been officially designated as a globally imperiled habitat.
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