Florida's landscape is shaped by water. Large inland lakes, small ponds, reservoirs and marshes appear throughout the state, alongside the coastal wetlands for which Florida is widely known. But these mapped water features are not distributed evenly from one county to another.
This project uses the Florida Hydrography Dataset to examine where mapped waterbodies are located across Florida's 67 counties. The analysis compares both the total number of features in each county and their density, showing how many mapped waterbodies appear per 100 square miles of land.
Understanding the data
The dataset contains mapped polygon features classified as lakes, ponds, reservoirs and swamps or marshes. These features range from prominent bodies of water to much smaller features that may not be familiar to nearby residents. Nearly 99% of the waterbodies included in the statewide dataset did not have a recorded name.
This does not necessarily mean that the features have no local or informal names. It means that no name appeared in the corresponding field of the hydrography dataset.
Counts alone do not provide a complete picture because Florida's counties vary considerably in land area. A geographically large county may contain many waterbodies overall while still having a lower concentration than a smaller county. Looking at both totals and density makes those differences easier to see.
Waterbody density varies across Florida
To compare counties more fairly, the map measures the number of mapped waterbodies per 100 square miles of land. Darker counties have a higher concentration of mapped water features, while lighter counties have fewer features relative to their size.
This measure does not show how much surface area each feature covers. Instead, it shows how frequently separate mapped waterbody polygons appear within each county.
Waterbody density is calculated as the number of mapped waterbodies per 100 square miles of county land area.
Total counts highlight different counties
The counties with the most mapped waterbodies overall are not always the counties with the greatest density. Polk County leads the state with 21,609 mapped waterbodies, followed by Hillsborough and Manatee counties.
The ranking shows the scale of mapped water features within each county. When viewed alongside the density map, it also demonstrates why raw totals and area-adjusted rates answer different questions.
Methodology
The analysis used polygon features from the Florida Hydrography Dataset and county boundaries from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Both datasets were projected into the same Florida coordinate system. A representative point was created for each waterbody and spatially joined to county boundaries using GeoPandas. County totals were then divided by land area to calculate waterbody density per 100 square miles.
Waterbodies that could not be assigned to a county were excluded from county-level totals and density calculations. The dataset represents mapped hydrographic features and should not be interpreted as a complete inventory of every body of water currently present in Florida.