Florida’s Water Resources

In Florida, life is all about water. Learn all about our amazing and unique water resources.

What Is a Watershed?
Watershed Problems
How Watersheds Work
Rainfall
Rivers
Groundwater
Public Policy & Water in Florida
Management, Education & Stewardship

What Is a Watershed?

A watershed is a land area whose runoff drains into any stream, river, lake, and ocean. A watershed boundary is the divide separating one drainage area from another. Watersheds may be as small as the portion of a yard draining into a mud puddle or as large as the Mississippi River Basin, which drains 1.2 million square miles.

All land area is part of a watershed. Whether we live in Florida or any other state or country, we all live in a watershed.

You can find the watershed in which you live by browsing a map and looking for the stream located closest to you. If you trace the stream upward to its beginning you will reach the headwaters, whereas if you trace it downward you will eventually reach a larger stream or river, a lake, or the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico. Everything between is your watershed.

Watersheds

Much of Florida was once swampland--naturally covered with water at least part of the year. The state was thought to have too much water, and beginning in 1845, several engineering programs were initiated that changed Florida’s landscape forever. These programs:

Drained the swamps to make way for houses and farming
Cut canals across the state to facilitate drainage and to make navigation faster and safer
Were designed to hold back flood water

While drainage and flood control are still issues in several watersheds, new problems related to water have emerged in most watersheds. After all of the human alterations to the waters of Florida, there is now not enough water in several watersheds of Florida, and many areas of the state have problems with water quality.

How Watersheds Work

As water flows downhill to progressively larger streams and rivers, it moves over land and provides water for urban, agricultural, and environmental needs. A watershed community is made up of all the people who live in that watershed, plus all other animal and plant life. These humans, plants, and animals all depend on the watershed and influence its function.

Flowing water carries organic material that provides food and shelter for aquatic life. Water may also carry pollutants like motor oil, fertilizers, and pesticides.

Many things degrade water quality. Even in pristine watersheds where water quality is not directly affected by humans, "natural" pollutant sources are abundant, including sediment from stream bank erosion, bacteria and nutrients from wildlife, and chemicals deposited by rainfall.

Watersheds have five important functions. They:

Collect water from rainfall
Store water of various amounts
Release water as runoff
Provide diverse sites for chemical reactions to take place
Provide habitat for flora and fauna

Human activities affect all the functions of a watershed. For example, where buildings and parking lots cover the ground, it is harder for water to soak back into the ground (this is called infiltration), and most of it runs off into collection ditches where stream channel erosion may occur.

Reduced infiltration may also mean that less water gets back into Florida’s aquifers, which provide almost all of the state’s drinking water. This means that residents could be faced with water shortages.

With both urban and agricultural land uses, chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides can mix with rain entering the soil and may reach groundwater, causing pollution of public and private wells.

Rainfall

Florida receives an average of fifty-five inches of rainfall a year. The nation as a whole averages thirty inches per year. Nevada, the driest state, has an average rainfall of only nine inches per year.

Total annual rainfall for Florida typically varies (sometimes greatly) from one part of the state to another, from one season of to another, and from one year to the next. Such rainfall variations have direct impacts upon surface water and groundwater supplies.

When it doesn’t rain for a few weeks, Florida’s mostly sandy soils dry out, streams shrivel, and the groundwater level falls.

Rivers

Of Florida’s five largest rivers, four are in the drainage basins of northern Florida, with headwaters in Alabama or Georgia. The fifth largest river, the St. John's, flows northward beginning in Indian River County and ending at the Atlantic Ocean near Jacksonville. Southern Florida is dominated by the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades basin which extends from central Florida (Orlando area) to the southern tip of the peninsula.

Many streams in south Florida have been altered by an extensive system of canals and levees that provide flood control, drainage, and water for agriculture near Lake Okeechobee and for cities on the lower east coast.

Some portions of the original Everglades have been used as shallow water conservation areas during the past four decades. The remaining Everglades areas at the southern tip of the peninsula comprise the Everglades National Park, which receives water from this managed system.

Groundwater

The principal source of groundwater for most of Florida is the Floridan Aquifer. It is the source of municipal water supply for such cities as Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Gainesville, Orlando, Daytona Beach, Tampa, and St. Petersburg. It also yields water to thousands of domestic, industrial, and irrigation wells.

The thick layers of porous limestone comprising the Floridan Aquifer underlie the entire state, but in South Florida, the water the limestone contains has too many minerals to be used for domestic, industrial, or agriculture purposes. Water in the Floridan Aquifer is replenished by rainfall in central and northern Florida.

Public Policy & Water in Florida

Water Allocation Policy

The early history of water policy in Florida dealt mostly with drainage and flood control, especially in central and southern Florida. Special acts of the legislature created special drainage districts which, in more recent years, provide water storage and conservation as well as drainage and flood control. The United States Army Corps of Engineers, with federal government funding, built the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project between 1949 and 1965.

The Florida Water Resources Act of 1972 established a form of administrative water law that brought all waters of the state under regulatory control. Five water management districts were formed, encompassing the entire state. Each district covers one or more important water basins. The five districts are the South Florida Water Management District, the Southwest Florida Water Management District, the St. John’s River Water Management District, the Suwannee River Water Management District, and the Northwest Florida Water Management District.

Each district is controlled by a governing board of nine members who reside within the district, except the Southwest district, which has eleven board members. The members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Florida Senate to serve four-year terms.

The districts are required to implement regulatory programs for well construction, consumptive water use, and alterations to the management and storage of surface water. In addition to permitting authority, the districts have broad powers with respect to maintaining, regulating, altering, or constructing waterways and appurtenant facilities.

Statewide authority for water resource management was vested in the Department of Environmental Regulation (which has since merged with the Department of Natural Resources by an act of the 1993 Florida Legislature to become the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)).

Water Quality Policy

The Air and Water Pollution Control Act provides the DEP with broad powers and duties to protect and improve water quality throughout the state. The DEP classifies surface and groundwater bodies according to their most beneficial uses; establishes water quality criteria; develops standards of quality for wastewater discharges; and runs a permit system for operations that may pollute water (industrial plants, farms).

Management, Education &Stewardship

Florida faces difficult challenges regarding watershed resource management. The current pressures that humans place on these watersheds are already causing stress on the environment, and Florida's population is expected to grow from seventeen million in 2003 to twenty million by 2020. One thousand people move to Florida every day. This growth poses great challenges in water resource management.

Watershed management involves three main activities:

Rehabilitation of abandoned and misused lands
Protection of natural and sensitive areas
Enhancement of water resources

Watershed planning is a process in which communities can make better choices about future growth. Watershed stewardship programs involve developing watershed educational programs for the residents of the watershed.