Orchestrating Everglades Restoration

Photo By Brigida Sanchez | Great Egrets are wading birds that thrive in freshwater and saltwater habitats. In the 19th Century, the Great Egret was hunted for its plumes and used to decorate women's hats. As a result of education, conservation and restoration measure, the population of wading birds such as the Great Egret have grown. Programs such as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) are a framework for restoring, protecting and preserving the greater Everglades ecosystem. Through the Restoration Coordination and Verification (RECOVER) program, agencies can provide a process for incorporating new science to track progress of impacted ecosystems and manage water.  (Photo by Brigida I. Sanchez)  

JACKSONVILLE, FL, UNITED STATES

11.03.2021

Story by Brigida Sanchez 

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District

Close your eyes for a moment and call up your old friend. Yes, that old friend, Ms. Imagination. It's probably been a while since you've spoken,but ask her. Ask her to take you to the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. A place where you can sit for a while in a vast, untamed landscape. Look up, and you'll see cumulus clouds scurrying across a big blue skyway. Listen, and you'll hear a full orchestra of rustling cypress, a choir of birds, stridulating bugs, croaking frogs and bellowing gators playing in harmony as blades of grass and saw palmetto swing and sway in the sunlight.

Then as a bead of sweat slowly slides down your back, and a squadron of mosquitos dives down in an audacious plan of attack, you quickly open your eyes.

Welcome back from your introductory trip to Florida’s Everglades. A world of 1.5 million acres of saw grass marshes, mangrove forests, and hardwood hammocks dominated by wetlands.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is one of 10 Federal and state agencies, alongside the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, vested in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). The plan is to restore, preserve and protect the south Florida ecosystem while providing for other water-related needs of the region, including water supply and flood protection.

The question is, how does this fellowship track changes in the system that is the Everglades. The team must consider many factors such as challenges of climate change, urban development, the eight million and growing population that relies on it for potable water, and the flora and fauna that the Everglades sustains.

The answer is Restoration Coordination and Verification , a multi-agency team of scientists, modelers, planners, and resource specialists who organize and apply scientific and technical information in ways that are essential in supporting the objectives of the CERP.
"Preliminary investigations began in the early 2000s, and the majority of the current monitoring programs began around 2005. In addition, some monitoring components were built on existing efforts and, therefore, have an even longer and more valuable data sets," said, Gina Paduano Ralph, lead scientist, USACE-Jacksonville District.

She went on to explain that there is a critical link between the acquisition of monitoring and research data to the system-wide assessment of status and trends of ecological indicators, as well as to the decision-makers through the Adaptive Management Program. These factors are essential to reducing the uncertainty in decisions and evaluating CERP's success. This type of monitoring and feedback loop ensures that science guides CERP decision making, increasing the overall success of providing Everglades restoration initiatives.”

The question scientists are seeking to answer is can they restore the remaining Everglades to approach its original state? Humans have played a role in the Everglades' current state, and now with CERP in its restoration.

Through CERP, restoration is achieved by removing barriers to sheet flow, creating and cleansing water, managing seepage and adjusting operations. It is through these components that management of the water that is crucial to reestablishing the Everglades can be reached.

RECOVER scientists are on the ground, trekking through mud, gliding across wetlands in airboats, and kayaking through what is the Everglades to observe and collect data. The team has developed and implemented a Monitoring and Assessment Plan.

Jenna May, USACE-Jacksonville District biologist, said, "The RECOVER MAP is designed to test ideas about what can be done to restore the ecosystem and determine whether changes seen in the ecosystem result from restoration activities or other factors, such as climate change and rising sea level. Some of the plant and animal species, or ecological indicators, RECOVER is monitoring as part of the MAP include submerged aquatic vegetation, eastern oyster, crocodiles, juvenile spotted seatrout, periphyton, tree islands and wading birds."

May noted that the first-generation Picayune Strand Restoration Project is a success story. The PSRP intends to redistribute the freshwater flow, creating more uniform salinity patterns within the Ten Thousand Islands Estuary.

Regarding CERP, ecological benefits that have been documented are manatees taking advantage of the Manatee Mitigation Feature, a warm-water refuge. May also adds that there has been a reemergence of foraging wading birds and native flora that have been absent in the area for decades.

Along with successes, there are environmental conditions that are a challenge in ecosystem restoration. For example, May cited that scientists realize that the pre-drained Everglades system was more saturated than previously thought. To achieve the team's ecological outcomes, more water needs to flow through the system to have more birds, more bugs, more frogs, more gators, and of course, more native plants. That existing constraints such as seepage management, water storage and water quantity will need to be addressed before enough additional water is available to see improvements in the southern portions of the system,” May said. “Additionally, some project teams are strategizing how to promote system-wide resilience so that the goals and objectives of the CERP can still be met in light of future changes, such as climate change and sea-level rise."

CERP has seen success through challenges because of RECOVER's ability to capture a dynamic picture from the micro to the macro level. May emphasized that "the team continues to provide rich data resources and powerful predictive tools to CERP projects for almost two decades. I think we are fortunate to have developed some robust long-term datasets that projects can use and feel confident in."

Is it possible to know how many birds have nested? Can planners figure out if there are enough oysters and native aquatic plants to help filter the water coming down from the North? Can we have CERP without RECOVER?

"RECOVER is a requirement of the Programmatic Regulations. However, the continued decline in RECOVER resources to include monitoring data severely limits RECOVER's ability to conduct scientific investigations; to promote the best possible outcomes with CERP," Ralph said.

The dictionary defines syncopation as a musical term meaning a variety of rhythms played together to make a piece of music. So, birds singing, bugs friskily rubbing their wings, leathery lizards huskily groaning, and of course, scientists with their spreadsheets and electronic dashboards plugging in numbers are all essential to orchestrating the restoration of the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, the Everglades.

Imagine the orchestra of that sound.

• Date Taken: 11.03.2021
• Date Posted: 12.29.2021 17:52
• Story ID: 412092
• Location: JACKSONVILLE, FL, US