THURSDAY:

The watershed does not stop at the border between Florida and the
ocean continues to the Florida Keys by way of Florida Bay
In 1980s (87-88) there was a system collapse in Florida Bay
almost half of the species died out within a period of months
o Brought a threat to the reef and the commerce
o Fishing for game fish was seriously impacted the
industry went downhill, and that got the movement
going that resulted in 12 billion dollars of governmental
funding to restore Southern Florida
o Became a positive feedback loop the more that died,
the more that it killed off.
Primary die off
Secondary die off caused by massive eutrophication and
algal blooms
o Blanketed water and killed off the thalassia underneath
it
o Sediment material got suspended and stored in the
water column
Shark slew saw grass, low lying river-like flow. Taylor slew is the
other grass river
Everglades National Park was the first national park that started to
preserve the wildlife dedicated/formed during the reign of Teddy
Roosevelt
Biscayne National Park is a very urban national park has more
people in and out of it every day than other national parks
Biscayne bay discharges about once every tidal cycle
Shallow
About 1/3 of the total volume of the bay is exchanged every
single time
Biscayne bay is open to the ocean almost entirely along its
width few islands break it up
Pre-Drainage Everglades Ecosystem:
Ridge and Slough country has a lot to do with the way
water flowed through the area
o Most of the tree-islands in this country were teardrop
shaped what the species of trees are depending on
where you are and whether or not there will be water
coming up from Gulf or not
o Depressions in the bedrock that allow building up of soil
and peat
o Large amounts of freshwater
 Ridge on the coast of Florida allows half of the water that
lands on the ridge to move to the ocean and half of it goes
back into the water shed
Large spatial scale 2.5 million acres of wetlands contributed
to high aquatic production, provided large foraging ranges for
highly mobile species, translating to high population resilience
Heterogeneous habitat highly diverse mosaic of plant
communities made up of uplands and freshwater marshes
grading into coastal and estuarine habitats
Dynamic storage and sheetflow flooded at nearly all times
o Expansive marsh vegetation, extremely low elevation
gradients, peat and limestone substrates resulted in
very slow rates and wet season carryover
o Historically there were intact ridge and slough
landscape, but as they dropped the water level through
the 60s and 70s, those areas dried up and changed. As
they changed plants began to grow there in a different
way and they regenerated a lot of their own sediment
o As they began to re-flood it, they realized that an
alternate stable state had developed, and they
everglades continued at the state it was already at.
Wet and dry hydrologic cycles strong seasonal and annual
patterns of rainfall, marsh flooding, and estuarine inflows
which control the timing of biological activities (production,
dispersal, survival)
Oligotrophic ecosystem plant and animal communities were
adapted to extremely low nutrients (primarily from rainfall)
Morrow (sp?) formed by algae that produce calcium carbonate themselves, or by
shifting the cycle back and forth carbonate precipitation