The conversion of agricultural and rural lands for development purposes reflects one of the greatest threats to key ecosystem services in the United States. This poster addresses land use change dynamics in southern Florida, linking them to local governance-zoning institutions. Study of land use and zoning patterns informs broader questions of relevance to the LTER, including: “What is the pattern of land and water use change in urban and working systems: what are the temporal and spatial patterns of human activity and ecosystem dynamics in LTER regions? “ It also addresses sub-question “a”: “What are past, current, and anticipated trends and regional patterns of development, urbanization, management, and land cover change?” In the FCE LTER land use and land cover change are mediated and affected by governance. In order to effectively forecast future changes and impacts on the landscape an understanding of the governance regulating these changes is important. For example, the raison d’etre of zoning is to affect land uses in the area zoned. However, this poster demonstrates that current land uses can also influence zoning changes. In many cases, zoning laws designed to achieve certain landscape outcomes may have complex, unintended consequences. For instance, in Miami-Dade county (as part of the FCE LTER) there are numerous (and diverse) examples of this phenomenon. Through the acquisition and overlay of land use and zoning GIS shapefiles as well as geo-referenced zoning variance records over time and the utilization of statistics, several conclusions have been drawn. First, simply zoning a parcel of land as “agriculture” does not guarantee that parcel can remain an economically viable farm, as nearby landscapes and land uses, along with economic opportunities and disincentives, can strongly outweigh the effects of zoning alone. Second, the rezoning of lands from agriculture to residential, commercial, or some other form of development hastens the conversion (and the prerequisite zoning change) of nearby lands still zoned for agriculture. Third, the greater number of edges an area of agriculturally zoned land has with land zoned for development affects how quickly that land will also be rezoned for development. Lastly, allowing subdivision of agriculturally zoned lands into five acre lots discourages agricultural food production and encourages instead nurseries or non-productive “ranchettes.”