Flow Day!
Mike Bush is a guest blogger and a PhD student in the Trexler aquatic ecology lab at FIU (http://faculty.fiu.edu/~trexlerj/).
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Everglades restoration can come in many forms, from ensuring
that water heading south through the Everglades Agricultural Area is stripped
of excess nutrients before it hits the more natural areas of the Everglades to
shuffling around huge amounts of water under Alligator Alley into Fakahatchee
Strand.
Perhaps no
project is as ambitious as the Water Conservation Area 3A Decompartmentalization
and Sheetflow Enhancement Project (we just refer to it as “DPM” or “Decomp” for
short, thank goodness). DPM is a multifaceted project, with major involvement by the South Florida Water Management District and the US Army Corps of Engineers, that focuses on removing
levees and plugging canals that are found throughout the Everglades, hence the
“decompartmentalize” part. The overarching goal here is to restore sheetflow, that
slow moving conveyance of water through the Everglades that inspired Marjory
Stoneman Douglas’ phrase “River of Grass”. A component of DPM is the DPM
Physical Model, the first step in testing how restoration of sheetflow will affect
sediment and nutrient transport. This in turn could affect the plants and
animals of the system, including how the ridge-and-slow structure of the
Everglades is maintained or altered.
I’ll
post aerial photos within the next couple of weeks! Stay tuned! Photo credits go to Sabrina Schneider, one of those very excellent techs I spoke of.
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