Notes:

This is a hammock located on south Key Largo shortly before the Overseas highway turns on its way into Tavernier. There’s a nice plot on the ocean side with a big fence and grassy area with sign and everything, and a little farther southwest there’s another plot on the bay side. The bay side is hammock blending rapidly into coastal buttonwood scrub with a narrow zone of mangroves along the water. The ocean side has a large buffer of lush hardwood hammock, followed by a strip of rockland (a highly unusual community on the keys, the legacy of some sort of development from the early 1900’s, I believe), and then a very broad mangrove zone that terminates finally in the eponymous Dove Creek (it might continue beyond the creek, but I’ve never ventured over there). Airplants (Tillandsia spp.) and lichens (Ramalina, Dirinaria, Physcia, Leptogium, and many crusts and an additional species or two of macrolichens, including the only Cladonia I’ve seen on any of the Keys) positively abound in the open well-ventilated areas of both sides. The hammock is dominated by poisonwood (Metopium toxiferum), spanish stopper (Eugenia foetida), dogwood (Piscidia piscipula), gumbo limbo (Busera simarouba), black ironwood (Krugiodendron ferrum), and buttonwood (Conocarpus erectus). The rockland is mostly buttonwood.

Version: 0
Location created: Fri Jan 04 11:59:46 -0800 2008
Last modified: Fri Jan 04 11:59:46 -0800 2008 by Jason Hollinger (jason)