What was meant to be a giant suburb in south Florida is now close to functioning like wetland again.
Picayune Strand, northwest of Everglades National Park, northeast of Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge and west of Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, has been restored to a somewhat native ecosystem after two decades of reverse-landscape engineering.
The area was part of a huge land package bought by real estate company Gulf American in the 1950s for a planned housing development called Golden Gate Estates.
The company tried to dry out the swamp with major landscape changes, but the effort failed. Picayune Strand sits about 2 feet lower on average than the Golden Gate Estates land to the north, and that small difference made flooding hard to stop. Gulf American later went bankrupt.
Conservationists working under the Everglades Restoration Plan of 2000 identified Picayune Strand as one of the first projects to pursue. Since 1985, they had been buying back private land, much of it never built on, that Gulf American had sold. By 2004, the land had been consolidated into a conservation package.
Gulf American had dug four large canals to move water off the land and used the earth and stone from that work to build causeways and roads across the area.
Plugging those canals became an early priority for groups including the Everglades Foundation, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and the US Army Corps of Engineers.
To do that, crews tore up the roads and put the material back into the canals.
Michael Duever, an ecologist who has monitored the project, told Yale News: “Picayune is as good a place in South Florida that there is, in terms of getting it back to what it was before. We’re feeling that we’re in the range of 90 plus-or-minus percent of restoration.”
Some compromises remain because people still live in Picayune Strand. Duever said part of the missing 10 percent includes three pumping stations that pull rainwater out of the closed canals on the project’s northern boundary and move it into large basins, where it leaks out in many directions.
Water levels are sometimes higher than natural and at other times drier.
Vegetation is returning, though not always ideally. Upland plants can no longer spread farther south because of the continual water bodies, and native species that had missed the continual wetness are also returning, including a native wild sunflower.
The restored area is expected to help several endangered species, including the red-cockaded woodpecker and the Florida panther. Studies have already shown increased insect abundance is helping the bonneted bat, the largest bat in Florida, with a wingspan of more than 30 centimetres.
“I kind of view Picayune Strand as a microcosm of the entire [Everglades] plan,” Stephen Davis, chief science officer at the Everglades Foundation, told Richard Mertens at Yale.
Read more from Good News Network.
