Oak scrub is a xeric community of scrub oaks and other shrubs with few to no pine trees.  Vegetation on the ground is very sparse with many bare sandy patches.  Its soils consist of very well drained, deep, white sands that occur on sand ridges along former shorelines.  The soils are nutrient-poor and infertile, yet oak scrub has developed adaptations to such a stressful environment.  The typical plants in an oak scrub community include sand pine, longleaf pine, slash pine, sand live oak, myrtle oak, Chapman's oak, saw palmetto, rosemary, rusty lyonia, ground lichens, scrub hickory, scrub palmetto, hog plum, silk bay, beak rush, milk peas, and stagger bush (Florida Natural Areas Inventory, 1990).  The Dicerandra Scrub Sanctuary in Titusville is the only location that the rare mint, Dicerandra thinicola, is found in the world.  Animals of interest that utilize this habitat include the Florida scrub-jay, gopher tortoise and pygmy mole cricket (Prusak, personal observation).

Like many other upland communities, oak scrub is fire maintained (Florida Natural Areas Inventory, 1990).  Due to sparse ground vegetation and minimal leaf litter, fires that originate from the surrounding flatwoods will frequently burn into, but usually not through, this scrub ecosystem (Myers, 1990).  When fire does burn through scrub, it burns very intensely, reducing the dense buildup of scrub understory (Florida Natural Areas Inventory, 1990).  In Brevard County, natural fires burn through oak scrub on an interval of 2-20 years.  Without these stand replacing fires, oak shrub height and biomass will increase, open spaces will decrease, and eventually, oak scrub will develop into a xeric hammock (Breininger et al., 1999; Schmalzer and Hinkle, 1992a; Florida Natural Areas Inventory, 1990).

The Florida scrub-jay is ranked as Threatened both in Florida as well as nationally.  In order to prevent the Florida scrub-jay from declining to extinction, the habitat in which the jay lives must be managed.  Many land managers manage oak scrub communities for optimal Scrub-jay habitat.  In Brevard County, there are four stages of oak scrub.  Stage 2 contains optimal habitat conditions around which oak scrub should be managed for Scrub-jay survival.  This stage probably represents the conditions of the maturity of oak scrub in Brevard County that existed during pre-settlement times (pre-1943).  For instance, lightning fires probably burned though scrub on an interval of 2-20 years.  For optimal Scrub-jay habitat, however, oak scrub should be burned on an interval of 2-10 years.  This frequent burning provides the short shrubs and the open spaces Scrub-jays need in order to survive.  But since scrub conditions differ from site to site, many oak scrub features should be taken into consideration to determine burning strategies (Breininger et al., in press).