Restoring the Flow: A Milestone in the Revival of the Everglades

The story of the Picayune Strand Restoration Project begins in the 1950s, when the Gulf American Corporation set out to turn 114,000 swampy acres of southwest Florida — an area eight times the size of Manhattan — into a giant rural subdivision called Golden Gate Estates. It was said to be the biggest such development in the country. The land in question was not pristine. As in much of South Florida, loggers had swept in during the middle of the 20th century and cut down most of the old-growth cypress. The only trees left were those too small to sell.

Gulf American made things worse. To drain the wet and flood-prone land, the company blasted canals in the limestone bedrock, then used the spoils to build hundreds of miles of elevated roads. It ensnared buyers, many of whom lived in other states and countries and never saw what they were buying. “The wilderness has been pushed aside,” the company boasted in a brochure. “With calipers and slide rules, draglines and dynamite rigs, we are literally changing the face of Florida.”

In the end, hype like this ran up against the realities of taming the swampland, and the company went bankrupt. Only the northern half of its project survived. Today it’s a vast semi-rural expanse of widely spaced houses that stretches for a dozen miles east of Naples to within a mile of the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.

The southern half was more remote. It was lower than its northern counterpart and, despite the canals, more vulnerable to flooding during the heavy summer rains. Most of the land was sold — there were 17,000 buyers — but few houses were ever built.

Starting in 1985, the state began buying up the land. Picayune was already in the crosshairs of conservationists. The canals built to drain it were disrupting coastal estuaries, where the water emptied. Also, Picayune was a degraded patch in a group of natural areas that were in much better condition, including the panther refuge and the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, an area famous for its rare orchids.

Acquiring the property of so many landowners was not easy. It took more than 20 years of fund-raising, legal wrangling, and the help of a private conservation group, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, for the state to buy up the land.

Restoration began in 2004. As with Everglades restoration in general, the first priority was to revive Picayune’s natural hydrology. To do that, the state and the Corps of Engineers plugged the four long parallel canals, which ran 48 miles in total, and dug up and scraped away the roads, dumping the material in the canals. 

The effect was almost immediate. Water from summer rains stayed on the land. What had dried out remained soaked for much of the year. Plugging the canals and leveling the roads also allowed sheet flow to resume, the broad, slow movement of water across the land that once characterized the whole Everglades ecosystem, what author Marjory Stoneman Douglas called the River of Grass. 

In January, the state, the Corps of Engineers, and conservationists celebrated the plugging of the last canal. And while the effect on Picayune’s hydrology hasn’t been perfect, Duever acknowledged, “we’re feeling that we’re in the range of 90 plus-or-minus percent of restoration.”

Picayune Strand State Forest takes its name from the wide, shallow, cypress-dominated river — a “strand” in Florida parlance — that flows from north to south. The strand is only a foot or two lower than the rest of the land, but that’s enough to stay flooded for most of the year. Slightly higher are the wet prairies nearby, open grasslands that might stay flooded as long as half the year. The driest bits of Picayune are forests of slash pine, but even these flood for a month or two during the wet season. The volume of water, its movement, and the time it stays on the land — these define Picayune and its complex ecology.

The Picayune Strand project is one of 68 projects contained in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, a multi-billion-dollar initiative that Congress authorized in 2000. The aim of the plan was to restore and reconnect parts of the Everglades that have been starved of water, polluted by agricultural nutrients, or otherwise degraded, while still protecting areas that were once Everglades but today are towns and suburbs or agricultural land. These include 700,000 acres of farmland in the middle of the Everglades, much of it planted in sugar cane. 

The Everglades ecosystem once covered 7 million acres, stretching from Orlando to the estuaries of the Gulf Coast. It included not just sawgrass marshes, but the marshes and lakes of the headwaters, giant Lake Okeechobee in the center, and places like the Big Cypress Swamp, of which Picayune is a part.

Today only half of this remains. Restoration does not mean recovering the half that’s been lost, but returning what’s left to as close to its natural state as possible. It’s a huge undertaking that is as much about engineering as about freeing nature to do its work. To restore the historic flow of water across the Everglades requires canals and reservoirs and holding basins, as well as marshes to cleanse the water of agricultural pollutants. It requires that coastal populations get the water they need and that other inhabited areas don’t get flooded. 

Picayune was one of eight projects given early priority and is one of first to be finished. It stands out for its scale and ambition — returning a vast semi-developed and highly degraded wetland to something close to its natural state.

“I kind of view Picayune Strand as a microcosm of the entire [Everglades] plan,” said Stephen Davis, chief science officer at the Everglades Foundation, a conservation group. 

Like all Everglades restoration, the Picayune project required compromise. One problem was how to deal with the water that flowed down the canals from the north. Just plugging them would have flooded the people who live there. The solution was to install three giant pump stations that, when the rainy season arrives in June, suck water from the canals at Picayune’s north end and dump it into “spreader basins” — large, shallow seasonal ponds with outlets that send the water flowing in different directions across the land. This system works well enough, but it sends more water into Picayune than was normal during the wet season, and somewhat less at other times of the year. 

Scientists studying Picayune say the hydrological restoration is clearly having ecological benefits. Maureen Bonness, a botanist who monitors vegetation in Picayune for the state, says that upland plants like lantana and cabbage palm have a harder time invading lower areas that now have more water. The same conditions have encouraged the spread of wetland species, including some new ones. Recently, Bonness was riding her mountain bike down Patterson Boulevard when a nearly two-foot-tall plant caught her eye.

“I didn’t recognize it at all,” she said. She worried it might be some kind of new invasive. Instead, it turned out to be a native sunflower, Helianthus agrestis, a wetland plant growing where there would likely be a foot of water or more by late summer. She had never seen it before in Picayune.  “There it was,” she exclaimed. “On Patterson!”

Researchers studying small mammals have found that the semi-aquatic marsh rice rat seems to have returned to Picayune, especially the wet prairies. Scientists using acoustic recordings have detected the presence of the endangered Florida bonneted bat in Picayune. This is an exceptionally large bat — it has a wingspan of up to 20 inches — and its range falls almost entirely within the greater Everglades ecosystem. The researchers say longer periods of flooding in Picayune likely means a greater abundance of insects that the bats feed upon.

The restored Picayune is expected to help other endangered species, including the red-cockaded woodpecker, which lives in open pine forests, and the Florida panther, which preys upon the deer that abound in Picayune. So far, though, the greatest beneficiaries of hydrological restoration seem to be macroinvertebrates, including snails, limpets, sponges, mollusks, shrimp, clams, and crayfish. Many insects are doing well, too, including, of course, mosquitoes.

“What we’re seeing is a tremendous recovery of biodiversity,” said David Ceilley, an ecologist who has been monitoring aquatic life in Picayune.

Still, ecological recovery has a long way to go. 

Invasive species are hampering restoration efforts across the Everglades. Brazilian pepper, an exotic shrub, is among the worst. In years past, thick stands of it grew up along Picayune’s roads and canals. Most of these were bulldozed when the roads were removed and the canals plugged. But they remain a constant threat, as do other invasive plants, like cogon grass, an exotic that can choke out everything else. 

Unwanted plants are just the beginning. On a recent morning, workers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the U.S. Geological Survey slid flatbottomed boats into a canal at the north end of Picayune, just upstream of where the canal had been plugged. They were part of a study into how hydrological restoration is affecting fish populations. Using electrodes attached to long fiberglass poles, they stunned the fish below, scooped them up in nets, and took them ashore to be identified and measured. 

Nick Trippel, a research supervisor, watched from the shore. He said previous sampling had found many more fish in the pools than in the still open canals to the north.  Most had been invasives that were able to travel here when the water flow was restored.

“The numbers have exploded in the plugged areas,” he said. For every hundred native bluegills, they would find thousands of nonnative tilapia and walking catfish. “We’re trying to figure out how to not make a haven for invasives and not affect the hydrology,” he said, adding, “There’s a lot we don’t know.” 

Bringing fire back to the land is another challenge of ecological restoration across Florida. Under natural conditions, wildfires sparked by lightning would have burned parts of Picayune, such as the pine flatwoods, and wet prairies would have burned lightly every two or three years, keeping them relatively open. The fire would have been enough to discourage invasive plants but not enough to kill the trees. 

Today in Picayune, scientists say, a shortage of funding and other limitations, such as the need to protect populated areas from wildfires, means there is not enough prescribed burning. Bonness says frequent prescribed burning in the nearby Florida panther refuge, which is under federal management, has resulted in the presence of 40 or 50 species of native grasses, sedges, and other herbaceous plants. In Picayune, the number is only 10 or 20.

Decades of dryness upended life in Picayune in ways large and small. For example, young cabbage palms cannot survive extended flooding or regular fire. Today these palms grow like weeds in Picayune, crowding cypress and pine trees. As much as a third of Picayune has been transformed to cabbage palm forest. Meanwhile, wet areas where cypress once flourished are in some places enormous willow thickets. That’s because when the land was drained, fires would burn more intensely. Willows, the earliest plants to colonize disturbed ground, have replaced the cypress. 

The cypress will probably return, but not for decades. Indeed, recovery in Picayune will take a lot longer than it took to grade the roads, plug the canals, and reestablish the flow of water. Even then, says aquatic ecologist David Ceilley, so much has changed that Picayune is unlikely to ever to become the place that Gulf American Corporation tried to subdue. 

“We’re not going to get it back to where it was 100 years ago,” he said. “We can’t reset the clock.”