The Gilchrist Club – Evaluating Development Alternatives through Scenario Land Use Planning

The Gilchrist Club is an unparalleled example of Florida’s working lands and natural landscape. For 35 years the property has been privately managed as a sustainable forestry operation, hunting club, and destination for outdoor recreation in Trenton, Florida. At 23,000 acres, the property embodies the unique ecological diversity and beauty that defines Florida’s wild heritage. 

I had the privilege of working with three of the founding members of the Club from 2012 to 2014. This project aimed to evaluate different development design alternatives from two critical vantage points: safeguarding new communities and structures against wildfire risk, and preserving pathways vital for wildlife movement amid the pressure of a growing community.

This goal was achieved by partnering with a design studio in the University of Florida School of Landscape Architecture and Planning to create three unique development scenarios. The graduate student studio engaged with the landowner, discovering that they had been considering developing a portion of the site for some time and were looking for innovative approaches to planning and design that could balance development values with a strong stewardship ethic. The studio applied a value-based decision-making framework to the planning and design of three resource-efficient rural community options.

For our project, the first scenario land use planning study evaluated the proposed developments based on wildfire resiliency. We used vegetation and fuel load data extrapolated from field surveys to develop fuel models for the entire property, and then we leveraged ArcGIS and FARSITE (a tool now part of the software program FlamMap) to simulate the growth and spread of wildfires based on two different real world wildfire events. This study allowed us to investigate the wildfire resiliency of different elements of each design, including the land use categories of low-, medium-, and high-density residential development and commercial development.

The second scenario land use planning study evaluated the proposed developments based on their impact to the resiliency of wildlife movement. We used field survey data and existing datasets to develop a wildlife corridor model for the Florida Black bear in ArcGIS. We produced four iterations of the model, one baseline model to visualize how a Black bear uses the landscape today, and three future scenario models to visualize how the use of the landscape by a bear would change given each of the three development design footprints. This study allowed us to investigate the resiliency of wildlife movement by assessing how different development patterns influence features of the wildlife corridor, including total corridor size, maximum corridor width, and size of corridor bottlenecks.

The project results were incredibly insightful for the property owners. At the time, the Club managers had a deep understanding of fire use in Florida thanks to a wonderful prescribed fire program that they actively employed to improve quail hunting access, wildlife habitat, and forest management. But, it was an eye opening experience to visualize how different development choices can influence the vulnerability of built structures to wildfire and how decisions by a developer can influence the long-term wildfire insurance risk of their future residents.

Our wildlife corridor study highlighted how some open space intermixed into development designs is necessary to preserve environmental assets and make a place a space that people want to live in, not just reside. But, the study offered new understanding that shifted the client’s perspective on how development at the site scale can influence the functionality of wildlife habitat within a broader corridor of preserved land at the landscape scale.

While performing this research we were fortunate to document the first Black bear on the property in decades. Located in the Waccasassa Flats, the Club lies in a Priority 4 section of the Florida Ecological Greenways Network, and while the Florida Wildlife Corridor is primarily derived from the top three priorities of the FEGN, in 2022 the Gilchrist Club property was added to the 2023 Florida Forever Priority List as a Less-Than-Fee Acquisition. The Gilchrist Club remains interested in owning and managing the property so that future generations can experience Florida’s hunting heritage, with select interest in developing a youth conservation center -one of the concepts presented in the three proposed development designs from the conservation design and planning studio.