The Florida panther is one of the most endangered mammals in North America. Once roaming lands across the Southeastern United States, the panthers occupy less than 5% of their historic range. Due in part to habitat loss along with attempts in the early 1900s to eradicate the species, today there are roughly between 120 and 230 free-roaming Florida Panthers left in the wild.
Meanwhile, with its promise of sunny beaches and warm climate, Florida’s human population is growing by an estimated 1,000 people daily. Areas that were previously devoid of human presence, or sparsely populated have since become grounds for suburban sprawl. Development around the southwest part of the state encroaches on panther territory.
The Center for Conservation Innovation advocates that education and awareness is key to coexistion between humans and panthers as more and more communities neighbor panther conservation lands.
A National Geographic project, Path of the Panther, tracked that these solitary felines, who are the last surviving subspecies of puma in the Eastern U.S. The panthers rarely linger, and there are no documented attacks on humans.
Sitting on her screened lanai one afternoon, Martha Grimes, remarked how on a recent evening she and her husband had watched as a panther traipsed through their backyard.
“He came up that way,” she said pointing toward her neighbor’s fence “wandered behind the lanai and into the forest behind the house.”
Grimes’ encounter would be categorized as a “sighting,” the most common type of human-to-panther interaction according to a dataset of confirmed human-Florida panther interactions from May 1, 2004, through December 16th, 2021, and produced by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).
Panther encounters in Punta Gorda are rare though — at least documented ones. Only one of the reported interactions occurred in Charlotte County. The overwhelming majority, however, were documented in Collier County. The southwesternmost county in Florida with Naples to the west and Alligator Alley to the East.
Collier County is also home to the state’s highest number of designated panther protection areas.
For this data story, panther interactions are documented and analyzed between the years of 2004 and 2021. A period corresponding with significant development in the area. The state saw its highest number of reported panther interactions in 2010.
In 2015 the Friends of the Florida Panther Refuge published an update citing an increase in Florida panther-to-human interactions since 2002, a statistic corresponding to an increased population in panther territory — particularly Collier County a part of the state whose geographic borders include Naples to the west and the everglades to the east.
Most interactions, the article mentions, happened within Golden Gate Estates, at the time, a semi-rural part of the county with a generally sparse population. However, this report was filed a decade ago. Since the population density of Golden Gate Estates has increased.
Over the period in which panther interactions were documented and recorded, Collier County consistently has the highest number of documented interactions.
