Ten Thousand Islands, Everglades National Park, Florida

The Everglades National Park comprises several significant habitats such as extensive mangrove forests, freshwater sloughs, saltwater marshes, tropical hardwood hammocks, cypress, and pine woodlands, open sawgrass prairies, marl prairies, wet prairies, islands of Florida Bay, and seagrass ecosystems. This vast network of wetlands and forests that make up the fragile ecosystem of the National park is fed by a very shallow, slow-moving river water from Lake Okeechobee. The Park also features the largest contiguous stand of protected mangrove ecosystem in the entire Western Hemisphere.