A scrubby flatwoods community is essentially a mix of pine flatwoods and scrub communities.  It has an open pine canopy with a sparse to thick shrub understory.  Scrubby flatwoods occur on flat, very well drained terrain that normally does not flood (Florida Natural Areas Inventory, 1990).  Although, it is not unusual for some oak-dominated areas in Brevard county to flood a few times a year (D. Breininger, personal observation).  Soils consist of several feet of white sand that tends to be bare of vegetation in some areas.  Typical vegetation includes longleaf pine, slash pine, sand live oak, Chapman's oak, myrtle oak, scrub oak, saw palmetto, staggerbush, wiregrass, dwarf blueberry, gopher apple, rusty lyonia, tarflower, golden-aster, lichens, silkbay, garberia, huckleberry, goldenrod, runner oak, pinweeds, and frostweed (Florida Natural Areas Inventory, 1990).  Animals of interest that utilize this habitat include the Florida scrub-jay, Eastern indigo snake and gopher tortoise (Prusak, personal observation).

Due to the fact that scrubby flatwoods have more bare ground and the vegetation is less volatile compared to pine flatwoods, scrubby flatwoods burn less frequently than pine flatwoods (Florida Natural Areas Inventory, 1990) - on a frequency of about every 8 to 15 years (P. Schmalzer, personal observation).  Even when the community does burn, it does little to effect the vegetation pattern since shrubs resprout quickly after they burn, eventually restoring the pre-burn composition of the community (Abrahamson et al., 1984).