BULLETIN FLORIDA STATE MUSEUM


 Figure 14.-Old Spoil Piles, Unreclaimed >30 years without lakes. The forest canopy
is dominated by live oaks and grape vines. Caesar weed and ferns are in the foreground.
Four piles of overburden are visible. The terrain slopes to Hooker's Prairie toward the
rear.


whereas the more uniform live oak/water oak forests resulted from more
uniform physical characteristics of environments lacking lake edges.
Compared with communities maintained on consolidated clay settling
ponds and reclaimed areas (Figs. 3-5), the maturing forests on unre-
claimed pits and spoil piles were far higher in diversity and abundance
of plant life.
 RECLAIMED PASTURES.-The reclaimed sites were grassy fields, either
ungrazed (periodically mowed, Fig. 16) or grazed (Fig. 17). Both treat-
ments were dominated by exotic bahia grass (Paspalum notatum), hairy
indigo (Indigofera hirsuta), and native partridge pea (Cassiafasciculata).
Both treatments had a few colonizing shrubs, mainly Baccharis.
 The most heterogeneous sites (H-4 and Kibler) were inadequately
represented by our samples. In each reclaimed treatment, sites were
chosen to span the range from homogeneous bahia grass pasture (as in
Fig. 17 for the grazed treatment) to patchy habitat that included pasture
and mesic swales, ditches, and ponds that were subject to less grazing or
mowing pressure (as in Fig. 16 for the ungrazed treatment). The full
range of plant diversity among sites was underestimated because of un-


VOL. 30 NO. 3