Progress Toward Restoring the Everglades The Fourth Biennial Review, 2012 (2012) / Chapter Skim
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2 The Restoration Plan in Context
2 The Restoration Plan in Context
Pages 19-38
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An overview of the legal context is also included. BACKGROUND The Everglades once encompassed about 3 million acres of slow-moving water and associated biota that stretched from Lake Okeechobee in the north to Florida Bay in the south (Figures 1-1a and 2-1a)
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in the remaining space between the lake and Everglades National Park (Light and Dineen, 1994)
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, the South Florida ecosystem had already been altered extensively. Prompted by concerns about deteriorating conditions in Everglades National Park and other parts of the South Florida ecosystem, the public, as well as the federal and state governments, directed increased attention to the adverse ecological effects of the flood-control and irrigation projects beginning in the 1970s (Kiker et al., 2001; Perry, 2004)
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, is "restoration, preservation, and protection of the South Florida Ecosystem while providing for other water-related needs of the region, including water supply and flood protection." The Programmatic Regulations (33 CFR 385.3) that guide implementation of the CERP further clarify this goal by defining restoration as "the recovery and protection of the South Florida eco system so that it once again achieves and sustains the essential hydrological and biological characteristics that defined the undisturbed South Florida ecosystem." These defining characteristics include a large areal extent of interconnected wetlands, extremely low concentrations of nutrients in freshwater wetlands, sheet flow, healthy and productive estuaries, resilient plant communities, and an abundance of native wetland animals (DOI and USACE, 2005)
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. What Natural System Restoration Requires Restoring the South Florida ecosystem to a desired ecological landscape requires reestablishment of the critical processes that sustained its historical functions.
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The dynamic reference approach requires a sufficient number of reference sites to capture the variation in the community across key ecological gradients and in response to other drivers. This will limit its applicability in Everglades restoration because sufficient numbers of sites that are not significantly degraded may not exist for some community types.
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Methods for securing water quality conditions compatible with restoration goals for a natural system that was inherently extremely nutrient poor, particularly with respect to phosphorus; and 5. Retention, improvement, and expansion of the full range of habitats by preventing further losses of critical wetland and estuarine habitats and by protecting lands that could usefully be part of the restored ecosystem.
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. Pythons have increased dramatically in abundance and range since 2000 and are now found throughout Everglades National Park and much of South Florida (Figure 2-2-2)
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necdotal observations A support the results of the road surveys: Everglades National Park personnel have had no reports of nuisance raccoons, which once required a removal program, since 2005 (Dorcas et al., 2012)
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, whereas currently roughly 350 are being removed per year from Everglades National Park (Dorcas et al., 2012)
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improvement feature, the State must be in compliance with WQ standards for the current use of the water to be affected and the work proposed must be deemed essential to the Everglades restoration effort…This determination must be based on some finding other than the project is a part of CERP and generally will aid the restoration effort." The memo goes on to state, "the Yellow Book specifically envisioned that the State would be responsible for meeting water quality standards." Therefore, it appears that until the water flowing into the project features meets existing water quality requirements or unless a special exemption is granted for projects deemed "essential to Everglades restoration," the state is responsible for 100 percent of the costs of CERP water quality project features.
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30 Progress Toward Restoring the Everglades FIGURE 2-2 Major project components of the CERP. SOURCE: Courtesy of Laura Mahoney, USACE.
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. WRDA 2000 endorses the use of an adaptive management framework for the restoration process, and the Programmatic Regulations formally establish an adaptive management program that will "assess responses of the South Florida ecosystem to implementation of the Plan; …[and]
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In fact, the CERP's effectiveness was predicated upon the completion of many of these projects, which include Modified Water Deliveries to Everglades National Park (Mod Waters) , C-111 (South Dade)
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Kissimmee River Restoration Project This project, authorized by Congress in 1992, aims to reestablish the historical riverfloodplain system at the headwaters of the Everglades watershed and, thereby, restore biological diversity and functionality. The project plans to backfill 22 miles of the 56-mile C-38 Canal and carve new sections of the river channel to connect channel remnants, thereby restoring over 40 miles of meandering river channel in the Kissimmee River.
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.a Modifications to the C&SF: C-111 (South Dade) Project This project is designed to improve hydrologic conditions in Taylor Slough and the Rocky Glades of the eastern panhandle of Everglades National Park and to increase freshwater flows to northeast Florida Bay, while maintaining flood protection for urban and agricultural development in south Miami-Dade County.
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, and any effort to address water quantity concerns must also consider water quality concerns. One of the most significant challenges to Everglades restoration is the inability to distribute treated water from the STAs into the Everglades Protection Area if that water leads to violations of legally mandated water quality standards.
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. In the Amended Determination, EPA directs FDEP to correct deficiencies in its water quality standards and articu lates that "the narrative and numeric nutrient criteria in the State's water quality standards are not being met for the Everglades Protection Area." The Amended Determination was intended to provide an enforceable plan for ensuring that the water entering the Everglades Protection Area from the EAA and the C-139 Basin complies with the narrative and numeric phosphorus criteria, which are already in place for the Everglades Protection Area.
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Additional detail on this plan is provided in Chapter 3. EPA's Numerical Nutrient Water Quality Criteria for the State of Florida The other major legal development regarding water quality since the committee's previous report involves the establishment of numeric nutrient criteria for water bodies in the state of Florida.
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A detailed description of both the federal and state rules and the various legal challenges involved in this issue is provided in Appendix E At this time, it does not appear that either of the pending rules for inte rior water bodies will have significant implications for Everglades restoration because numeric water quality standards for the Everglades have been in place for some time and there is no indication that either EPA or FDEP plans to extend its respective numeric nutrient criteria to replace the existing standard for the Everglades.
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