Field notes, native plant education, seed stewardship, restoration stories, and updates from Florida’s growing conservation community.
Our blog documents the plants, people, habitats, wildlife, and scientific practices behind Florida native seed conservation. The Florida Seed Bank blog includes species profiles, restoration science, conservation field notes, regional seed genetics, habitat stories, and updates from across the state, with new material added as the statewide collection grows.
If you lived in South Florida in the 1980s or 1990s, could you have inhaled wild orchid seeds without knowing it? Explore their remarkable windborne journey and the habitats they need to survive.
Read the Article
In 1995, wildlife biologists introduced eight female Texas pumas to rescue Florida's dangerously inbred panthers. The program helped save the species—but forever changed the genetic identity of its isolated pre-1995 population. Explore what was saved, what changed, and what genetic rescue means for conservation.
Read the Article
Hidden south of Lake Okeechobee, Tony’s Mound is part of an extraordinary Native American landscape of immense circular earthworks, radiating ridges, mounds, causeways, and possible celestial alignments. Explore the archaeology of the Belle Glade culture, the ancient wetland world that shaped these monuments, and the surviving native flora — including the endangered Florida orchid Epidendrum floridense.
Read the Article
Orange County commissioners reversed their earlier rejection of the controversial Tuscana proposal in the Shingle Creek Basin. The decision raises urgent questions about wetland loss, flooding, wildlife habitat, private property rights, and the future of the northern Everglades headwaters in Central Florida.
Read the Article
Florida’s butterfly orchid is a native epiphyte adapted to life on trees, with exposed roots, pseudobulbs, fragrant star-shaped flowers, and a remarkable dependence on healthy habitat. Learn how Encyclia tampensis grows, how to cultivate legally propagated plants, and why conserving orchids means protecting far more than the bloom.
Read the Article
Connected habitat protects more than wildlife. Florida Seed Bank examines the corridor’s role in climate resilience, safe panther crossings, and native plant conservation—and why seed banking cannot replace a living ecosystem.
Read the Article
Florida already has an established data-center industry. Proposed hyperscale and AI campuses represent a new phase of expansion, with risks to native habitat, wildlife, endangered species, and water supplies. Florida Seed Bank opposes environmentally destructive development and examines concerns about coal dependence and projected natural-gas demand.
Read the Article
More than half of the world’s orchid species could disappear within this century. Florida has already lost four native orchids from the wild, while Govenia floridana is presumed globally extinct. Climate change, overdevelopment, habitat loss, altered hydrology, invasive species, poaching, fragmentation, and pressure on protected public lands show why conservation cannot wait until the last plants remain.
Read the Article
Found nowhere else on Earth, Drosera floridana is a carnivorous sundew endemic exclusively to a tiny area of Bay and Washington counties in the Florida Panhandle. Its newly recognized species status highlights just how much could be lost if its specialized seepage habitat disappears.
Read the Article
Vanilla mexicana is one of Florida’s rarest native orchids. Hurricanes have already devastated portions of its dwindling populations, making Martin County’s surviving plants increasingly important and showing why seed conservation, genetic diversity, and geographic backup collections matter before the next major storm.
Read the Article
Hurricane Irma exposed how vulnerable Florida’s rare native plants can be even inside one of the nation’s most famous protected landscapes. Habitat fragmentation, storm damage, invasive species, altered hydrology, and aging infrastructure all complicate recovery.
Read the Article
Found naturally only in Charlotte County, the Punta Gorda spider lily, Hymenocallis puntagordensis, is one of Florida’s most geographically restricted native plants. Its tiny global range shows why conservation should begin before a rare species disappears.
Read the Article
Along Central Florida’s ancient sandy ridges, rare native plants survive intense sun, drought, nutrient-poor soils, and periodic fire. Preserving locally adapted scrub seed can help protect the unique genetics of the Lake Wales Ridge and other increasingly fragmented scrub habitats.
Read the Article
Northwest Florida protects a completely different side of the state, where longleaf pines rise above wiregrass, wildflowers, wet prairies, and pitcher plant communities. Preserving locally adapted seed is essential to restoring these extraordinary fire-shaped landscapes.
Read the Article
Florida is home to only four native vanilla orchid species, and all are endangered in the state. The leafy vanilla orchid, Vanilla phaeantha, reveals a hidden tropical side of Florida and shows why protecting seeds, habitat, fungi, pollinators, and genetic diversity must work together.
Read the Article
One of Florida’s rarest native orchids now survives in the United States at a single known South Florida location. Carefully documented seed collection, freezer storage, propagation, and protected habitat could help preserve its remaining genetics before the population disappears.
Read the Article
An invasive weevil is killing Florida’s native air plants before many can flower and release seed. Preserving documented, regionally diverse bromeliad seed may be essential to protecting their genetics and restoring depleted populations.
Read the Article
Florida’s native plants support pollinators, wildlife, waterways, soil health, and the ecological systems that make the state unique. As development continues to replace natural habitat, preserving regionally adapted native seed becomes one of the most important tools available for future restoration.
Read the ArticleFuture posts will cover ethical seed collection, Florida native plant identification, habitat restoration, regional seed genetics, invasive species, volunteer fieldwork, amplification plots, rare plant conservation, and ways landowners can help preserve Florida’s remaining wild flora.