Sand pine scrub is a xeric community with a closed to open canopy of sand pines and a dense understory of oaks and other evergreen shrubs.  Ground layer vegetation is sparse with many bare sandy patches alternating with dense stands of lichens.  Its soils consist of sandy, acidic, very well drained, nutrient-deficient soils.  Common vegetation in a sand pine scrub community include sand pine, red bay, myrtle oak, sand live oak, Chapman's oak, saw palmetto, scrub palmetto, rusty staggerbush, Florida rosemary, blue huckleberry, staggerbush, fetterbush, wild olive, blueberry, deerberry, and muscadine grape (Stout and Marion, 1993).  Animals of interest that utilize this habitat include the gopher tortoise, sand skink, scrub lizard, and Florida scrub-jay (PruSak, personal observation).

As with other scrub communities, sand pine scrub is fire maintained. Fires in this community can be either very small and extinguish rapidly or very large and burn with great intensity. Most of the scrub vegetation is initially topkilled by intense fires, but then will often resprout vigorously from existing roots. Sand pines of all age classes are not fire tolerant, and are killed outright by these fires. While the fire itself may kill the adult trees, the heat from this fire acts to open their cones, releasing the sand pine seeds onto the soil. These seeds will then germinate anywhere from one to three years post-fire, resulting in what is termed a "stand replacement" fire. Any large oaks present within the sand pine scrub community will be topkilled by the intense fires as well, allowing for the sand pines to reestablish their dominance in the tree layer. Fire suppression in this community may result in the succession of sand pine scrub into a xeric oak hammock. In the absence of fire mature sand pines may develop heart rot and die, and healthy sand pine cones may not be stimulated enough by the latent heat to release their seeds. The resultant lack of new sand pine seedlings will allow for the oaks to eventually dominate the landscape. On the other hand, fires that are too frequent will prevent cone-bearing pines from maturing by killing off the young pines and will also decrease the ground cover, eventually altering the fire regime (Stout and Marion 1993). The natural fire interval for maintaining sand pine scrub varies widely from 15 to 100 years (TNC, 1995), and is very site-specific.