Five mechanisms

Five cases are singled out on the interactive map because each shows a different mechanism reworking the region. Each rests on at least one official source, an independent source for any historical, financial or superlative claim, a date, a defined relationship or event, a separation of completed from announced activity, and no reliance on private communications. Node size, centrality and the outside share are computed from the dataset and are never adjusted for a case.

Greening and the grove to pasture turn

Huanglongbing reaches Florida in 2005 and the state's production falls from a 244 million box orange peak to about 20 million boxes twenty years later [INVSP][ATLFED][CIM25A]. The module's check columns make the conversion visible county by county: parcel groves exceed surveyed commercial citrus by 47,926 acres in Highlands, 22,889 in DeSoto, 14,221 in Hardee, and by a margin in every county, grove land already becoming pasture while the roll still reads groves [MOD][NASS24]. The documented exits carry names: Southern Gardens ceases processing in 2019; Alico, the listed heir of a railroad land company, winds down its citrus division after the 2024 to 2025 harvest, abandons trees on about 90 percent of its producing acres, ends its Tropicana agreement in May 2025 and turns to land sales and development applications [CIM19][ALPR25][ALSEC2][ALSEC3]. A dead grove at Lake Placid passing to a federal easement for rewilding closes the loop [HNSLP].

The sugar complex

The Network view's densest structure is the Glades sugar economy: U.S. Sugar with its mill, railroad, citrus subsidiary and company towns; Florida Crystals with Osceola, Okeelanta, the rice mill and the power plant; the growers cooperative with its Glades Sugar House; and the refining group they own together [USSH][FCJ][WSCGC][ASRH]. The complex is held up by institutions the map draws as its neighbours: the dike, the drainage district's canals, the breeding station at Canal Point, the experiment station at Belle Glade [WHHD][ARSCP][EREC]. Its towns are company artifacts: Clewiston planned around a mill, Bryant built for one and demolished after it closed, South Bay and Pahokee shaped by theirs [WCLE][WBRY][PBCH2][WPAH]. On the module's owner table U.S. Sugar carries 93,986 acres inside the six core counties, second in this dataset, with the bulk of its land east of them [MOD].

A tier of one

Lykes Bros is the module's natural break: 337,036 acres, 14.5 percent of the regional base, with the largest logarithmic gap in the owner distribution immediately below it [MOD]. The map shows what that acreage connects to: a Tampa headquarters and a steamship past; citrus sold by contract to Florida's Natural; two district scale water projects, Nicodemus Slough and Brighton Valley, that turn ranchland into storage infrastructure; easements in the Fisheating Creek basin; and stewardship recognition from Audubon to the state [LYKH][LYKC][LYKN][LYKB][SEAGL][AUDL]. One family company, held privately since 1910, is simultaneously the region's largest rancher, one of its water utilities and one of its conservation counterparties.

The solar wave

FPL's 2009 pilot at Arcadia was the nation's largest solar photovoltaic site at its dedication, as the utility reported; fifteen centers now run across DeSoto, Okeechobee and Hendry counties, every one a section scale parcel off the agricultural roll [FPLD][OBAMA][TYSP]. The April 2026 Ten Year Site Plan announces eighteen more in the module's reading, about 10,800 estimated acres, with service dates from 2027 to 2029; none is on the 2025 roll and every one is coded announced on this map, because the DOR code lags actual use and a site plan entry is not a plant [TYSP][MOD]. The wave's counterparties are unnamed: no filing reachable at this release names the selling landowners, and the map leaves the seller side of those edges empty until a record does [TYSP].

The invisible vegetable economy

The Census of Agriculture records 1,424 acres of watermelons and 3,762 acres of vegetables in DeSoto County; the parcel roll classifies about 4,300 agricultural parcels there as grazing and the satellite reads the same fields as pasture [AGC22][MOD]. The module states the mechanism as a limitation and this map carries it as a case: a rotational economy on leased rangeland, planted in winter, harvested in spring, invisible to every annual layer and surfacing only in the five year Census. The DeSoto Watermelon Association and the county's festival are its public face; the acreage itself appears in no map but this one [DWA][AGC22][MOD].

Status as of 12 September 2026

Observed status is what the sources record as having happened by the cutoff date. Announced or scheduled activity is listed separately and has not been confirmed as having taken place.