Florida Springs, Drought, and Data Centers | Coast to Canopy

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In 2026, most of Florida experienced Extreme (D3) or Exceptional (D4) Drought, and as of July, this has persisted in many areas. The effects are visible in water bodies connected to the Floridan aquifer. Spring flow is down in the Suwannee River basin, compounding decades of aquifer withdrawals that have placed the Suwannee on the Ten Most Endangered Rivers in the United States list released annually by American Rivers.

During the same drought, the output of Wakulla Spring has remained strong while many karst-connected waterways in its springshed, sinkhole lakes such as Lake Jackson and Upper Lake Lafayette, have dried down. Researchers are still trying to figure out the movement of water in the Wakulla springshed. When less water flows into it from one part of the aquifer, what sources then feed it?

In this episode of Coast tp Canopy, we talk about a new research initiative to fully map the cave system feeding Wakulla Spring, the largest such cave system in North America, and about communicating the connectedness between Tallahassee and the spring. We also look at water usage in Florida, and how it has affected the 300 springs around the Suwannee and its tributaries. And we consider the potential effects of AI data centers on Florida’s groundwater.

Meet our guests

I conducted two separate interviews for this episode, intercutting them to contrast springs and groundwater around the Suwannee and in Wakulla Spring.

• Haley Moody, Director of the Florida Springs Institute.
• Ming Ye, PhD, Professor of Hydrology at the Florida State University Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science (EOAS) and the Department of Scientific Computing.
• Kellie Keys, who for the last two years has served as the Communication Director of the Wakulla Springs Lab at Florida State University

Coast to Canopy blog posts are curated transcripts, a distilled version of the longer conversation we hear in the embedded episode. My notes appear in italics.

Wakulla Springs Mapping Project

Researchers from Florida State University are partnering with the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP) and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to map the Wakulla Spring cave system. Editor’s note- we interviewed Chris Werner with the WKPP last fall for Coast to Canopy.

Ming Ye: We were really excited it was funded last year by legislature, and we start project in February. So we have mapped about four miles, six miles. And we’re going to continue the work in the fall, doing the mapping. So in the past, have had really low contact with the spring. Only thing we do, like a dye tracing experiment, introduce a dye and see where it come out.

But it’s indirect. We also use geochemical data [and] isotope data, are the two we have. But they’re all indirect. Essentially, you’re like knocking around the wood to see where the hole is… Now we finally got a chance to go down into the cave.

[The sunfish submersible] has the sonar system so we can map the size of the conduit and geometry of it. And, it can also measure nitrate concentration, for example, and temperature and pressure…. We are in the system, not outside of system.

Sunfish: a cave diving research robot

Part of the legislative funding was used to purchase Sunfish, a submersible robot.

Ming Ye: It’s called [an] autonomous underwater vehicle. It’s immersive and it can flow by itself. And it’s six-dimensional, so you can just do a lot of things in the subsurface. Also, after it’s been trained, it has intelligence in it. It can make decisions on where to go. And more importantly, come back when the batteries are off.

So far, the Wakulla Spring cave system has been mapped by scuba divers. This is dangerous work, and it is limited by the capabilities of the human body.

Ming Ye: [Divers] use helium gas and, for under certain depths, probably 200 or 300 feet, [if] they stay in the water for one minute, it can take four minutes for them to get the helium out.

You only have limited… amount of energy to work in the cave. And so with this robot, you don’t need to worry about that as long as battery is there and they can do the work. [The Sunfish is] probably several times more efficient than us. This is in talking about the lengths of the work.

And also you can go places that divers would not go. It may be just too dangerous or too dark, all kind of situation. [Sunfish doesn’t] need to carry a gas tank, and they can carry sensors. New location, longer time and more data. Because the sensor can do a continuous monitoring and just like a fish.

This is first generation, and the second generation is more exciting. Is more like a torpedo and run faster, and the battery lasts long, and, there are fluid mechanics designed to make it more energy efficient and is smaller.

Drought in the Suwannee River basin

Haley Moody: On the Suwannee River, because there are 300 plus springs along the Suwannee, there is a significant portion of the of the flow is actually groundwater. Historic flow rates have the springs contributing as much as 50% of the flow of the river. So, when we’re in a drough it’s really challenging because we have a reduction of the surface water flow. But then we also have the aquifer level dropping and a reduction in the groundwater contribution to that river.

We also have pretty significant industrial uses of water that are happening along the Suwannee. For example, one spring that I can think of is White Sulfur Spring up in White Springs. It’s a spring at the turn of the century that was super popular. People were coming from all over the country to swim in the healing waters. There were all sorts of hotels and doctor’s offices that that popped up.

But, a phosphate mine went in, and in the 70s, it intermittently stopped flowing and now it has stopped flowing altogether.

The phosphate mine is still, in operation. It has changed hands, but it’s pretty clear why that spring went dry. So that’s something we’d like to prevent if we can.

Water usage in Florida

Haley Moody: I do like to focus on that public supply category, because I do think we all can make a difference. We’re all involved in that. And there are certainly things that we can do in our own homes to save water.

But there are some allocations that that seem to be a little out of proportion. And it gets really challenging when we’re in times of drought to really ask people to do what they can to save water. I know in the Tampa Bay region, restaurants had stopped serving cups of water to the people that were coming to patronize their restaurants. They had to actually ask for water.

Those things are a little hard to swallow when so much water is being allocated for a single permit for an industry, like phosphate mining. This particular phosphate mine up in White Springs (owned by Nutrien ltd.), for example, is allocated over 60 million gallons per day, which is really significant.

Nutrien self-reports a 20-30 million gallon daily use. Companies do not typically use their full allotment. This falls under the 297 million gallons used by industrial/ mining operations in Florida (See chart above).

AI Data Centers

Haley Moody: A medium sized data center could use as much as 300,000 gallons per day. A large-scale data center could use as much as 5,000,000 gallons per day. There are different types of systems. There are open loop and closed loop systems. But they both have both direct water use and an indirect water use.

We just have to keep a careful eye on both of those. Because the indirect water use from the electricity consumption can actually be quite large, even in those closed loop systems. This becomes really challenging when we see proposals for data centers show up within springsheds of outstanding Florida springs, for example.

What really needs to happen is that, whether it comes before the county commission or whether it comes before the Planning and Zoning Board or Planning and Development Board, they both really need to be in very close communication with the Water Management District. Whatever Water Management District they’re in, they need to make sure that they are requesting a water availability study before approving any sort of request for zoning change or approving a data center.

Florida is divided into five Water Management Districts. The Suwannee Riverside is in the Suwannee River Water Management District. Wakulla Springs is in the Northwest Florida Water Management District.

Haley Moody: They need to know from their Water Management District, how is this going to affect the water availability in our area. And if there is an outstanding Florida spring, how will it affect the minimum flow and level that’s been established for that spring? Or an outstanding Florida water, for that matter, that has a minimum flow and level.

The counties, and the planning and zoning boards, they really need to lean into the water management districts for that information, for the water modeling. Because [counties and planning boards are] not necessarily going to have that information.

Sinkholes

Haley Moody: We also have this situation in here in Florida with our lime rock aquifer. We have sinkholes that form and our water use actually has a lot to do with that.

Because we have this vast underground aquifer, in a lot of places in Florida, it’s the water that’s holding up the land above it. And if that water level drops and it drops too quickly, the land can drop right along with it. This is something that, again, if a county or an area is considering bringing a data center, they need to be really clear about that impact of the water use. Because sinkholes could open up. They need to know about that. They, again, can request a sinkhole susceptibility study from the Water Management District for the water use.

How much water is in the Floridan aquifer?

Ming Ye thinks that more data would help guide decisions about water resources.

Ming Ye: We have so many springs, so we have thousands of springs, and every spring is different. But I have not seen a statewide assessment how much water resources we have. Our population is growing and I heard we have people move in Florida every day.

I would say it would be very helpful to have a systematic study… we heard about the word “digital twins,” with AI technology, it’s maybe possible we could build some digital twin of the state of water resource or ecosystems, and then that can support decision making.

We could have a systematic study, have a tool for planning, for management. That would be led by some state agency for that effort.

Developing models to estimate the amount of groundwater in a system

Ming Ye: We need a geological information, need to know what kind of rock, what kind of geological time.

Also we use pumping test to figure out two things. One is porosity– how much pore space [is in the rock]. And then also another thing called hydraulic conductivity, how fast water flows [through the rock]. And then we would have something called a specific yield or a specific storage.

There are formulas we can use to calculate and how much water… and the best tool would be a model… to look at all the sources and look at the water budget.

Let’s say if you pump X amount of water, how that affect springs and rivers, and was and what the correlation between different factors. Say, if we increase or decrease how much, can quantify things. Let’s say if your rainfall increase X and how much spraying and the increase point five x or 0.1 x. So we cannot come from our machine learning, but we can do a model to have a quantification.

And those kind of information can definitely help us when they say how much water [a] utility we need to build, do we need to drill new wells and how deep they can go. So those information would be very helpful to estimate water resources and then have a decision support system for it.

Kellie’s Wakulla Springs tour

Ming Ye: The tour Kellie is leading is really great.

Kellie Keys: When I do tours with just FSU people, we start at Doak Campbell Stadium (on the campus of Florida State University) and south of the stadium is this little creek, and it’s like an urban creek. And that creek is the entire drainage point for campus. So if you’re ever near the stadium, walk over and check the creek out, and that creek flows into the same system that we’ve been talking about, same as Cascades Park.

It flows southward and you can actually follow it if you want to drive along and look at it with your own eyes, you can do that. And it flows into Lake Munson, which then flows south, goes underground, enters the cave system. As Ming has said, we have dye trace that the scientists put dye into this creek that goes underground. And then that dye came out, it will color spring.

So FSU is a very, very direct connection to the springs. I love when I get students on the tour who are not from the area. Literally their eyes just pop when they understand that. A lot of them haven’t been to the springs ever, so it’s like a really new connection for them.