(inspiring music)
Mark Parry: The watery world of the Everglades conjures different meanings for different people.
A cypress cathedral;
A mosquito infested swamp;
A sawgrass serengeti;
Or, a mangrove maze;
A wilderness without people;
Or, an ecosystem engineered by people.
For Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the Everglades was a slow-moving river through a vast expanse of sawgrass.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas: And the water runs down from Lake Okeechobee often as much as four miles an hour, you know.
And that is running water. So, there it was, a river.
Before the 'River of Grass', this vast wetland was called Pa-hay-okee by Native Americans.
Underneath all these ideas flows the liquid heart of the Everglades.
In constant motion.
And ever changing.
(helicopter whirring)
I’m Mark Parry. I’ve been studying alligators and crocodiles in the Everglades for nearly two decades.
Like everyone living in south Florida, this ancient reptile is dependent on freshwater.
We are on the East side of Shark Slough which is the deepest slough in the park.
We are in the second visit of our annual alligator nesting work.
So, we look at the distribution. Where they nest. How many nests. The effort each year.
What happens to them. Do they flood? Do they hatch? Do they get predated?
And we tie all that back into restoration, hydrological conditions.
So, they should be fine. We will take a quick look and see what stage they are at.
And, that is all we need on this one at this point.
(loud splash)
Ohh, there is mama. She snuck in and then ran away.
(laughs)
Yeah, you never put your back to where they’ve got deep water.
OK, the bottom of the clutch is just a couple of centimeters above the water.
Within about a week, those will probably hatch.
Restoring the Everglades is one of the largest restoration projects in the world.
The main purpose is to get the water right for nature and people in south Florida.
To understand Everglades Restoration, we first have to understand the Everglades.
(mysterious music)
The Kissimmee River in central Florida once followed a meandering course
into the shallow waters of Lake Okeechobee.
During the summer wet season, high waters overflowed Lake Okeechobee.
(thunder crackles)
First flowing through a custard apple forest.
Then into the sawgrass plains following the gentle slope south for 100 miles
through the sloughs and marshes,
before the higher elevations of tree islands and pine rocklands,
mangroves,
coastal prairies,
and into the brackish bays.
Life in the Everglades from sawgrass to seagrass depends on this gradual influx of freshwater
throughout the summer wet season.
(thunder crackles)
At the onset of the wet season,
(alligator bellows)
alligators build high and dry nest mounds throughout the freshwater marshes and sloughs.
If the eggs survive flooding and predators,
the baby gators hatch into their watery new world.
(baby alligator squeaky grunts)
Wet season transitions into dry season.
Alligators survive the winter dry season by digging out deeper ponds in the marsh to hold water even longer.
I call these alligator ponds the jewels of the Everglades.
They are the deepest part of the Everglades.
So, they are the last area that holds water.
Everything aquatic is gonna end up concentrating in here.
As dry season peaks, wading birds begin nesting together in the mangroves and tree islands.
(bird nest colony cacophony)
(inspiring music)
Receding waters trap small prey for the wading birds to feed.
Some find food by touch.
Others use stealth.
Year after year. Alligators nest. Waters rise.
Aquatic life disperses from alligator holes and other dry season refuges.
Waters fall. Wading birds nest.
And the whole cycle repeats.
The Everglades are dynamic.
Born from flood, drought, fire, tropical storms, and long inhabited by people.
People arrived in Florida over 14,000 years ago during the last Ice Age.
The Everglades we know today took shape between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago.
That means Native Americans were here before, during, and after the Everglades came into existence.
As tree islands began forming in the Everglades,
archaeological evidence shows that people were part of that process.
Today, the Native American tribes of the Seminole and Miccosukee continue their vibrant cultures in the Everglades
(egret croaks)
In the 1800s, Floridians began draining the swampy Everglades for development and flood control.
Historic Film Narrator: The engineers went to work.
Drilling, blasting, digging. Bite by bite.
The liquid heart of this area is Lake Okeechobee.
This monster had to be controlled by bigger levees
and by bigger canals that would give it bigger outlets to the sea.
More levees and improved channels and water control to discharge the floodwaters as fast as possible.
And that means enlarging, controlling and straightening this famous crooked river
so it could take the water smoothly all the way down to the big waters of Lake Okeechobee.
Canals, levees, and other water impoundments siphoned and imprisoned the life blood of the Everglades.
The Kissimmee River became the C-38 canal.
People now control where the water goes, when it goes, how much goes, and how clean it is.
The high and dry pine rocklands of the Miami Rock Ridge became the city of Miami.
A modern metropolis built over Tequesta Native American sites.
The ancient origins of the River of Grass were drained for farmland.
Fields of sugarcane now replace sawgrass in the organic peat soils south of Lake Okeechobee.
(thunder crackles)
Lake Okeechobee floodwaters no longer spill freely into the sawgrass.
Instead, people choose when to release water through gates in the Hoover Dike.
High water levels can jeopardize the stability of the dike.
To protect people from life-threatening flooding, water managers release water from Lake Okeechobee
into the Caloosahatchee River and St. Lucie Canal.
Waters high in nutrients and other agricultural run-off can fuel algae blooms in the sensitive
coastal estuaries impacting tourism, communities, and nature.
At the end of the drained system, Everglades National Park receives much less water now.
Without enough water, the entire Everglades ecosystem degrades.
(sparrow song)
The solution is to put the right amount of clean water into the right places at the right time.
(upbeat music)
Draining the Everglades took a lot of effort.
Restoring the Everglades will take even more effort.
Many restoration projects are undoing the infrastructure that drained the Everglades
and impeded water flow.
You can drive over one of the projects completed so far.
U.S. Highway 41 acted like a dam reducing water flow into the Everglades National Park.
Now, over three miles of new bridges and almost seven miles of improved roadway allow more water
to flow south into Shark River Slough, the park’s main conduit for freshwater.
The windy Kissimmee River was partially restored.
Engineers backfilled sections of the canal returning flow to the historic river channel.
Three new reservoirs under construction will store water to the west, east, and south of Lake Okeechobee.
Stormwater treatment areas will clean the reservoir water before releasing it.
New seepage barriers will keep clean water from slipping out porous limestone boundaries.
As long as people live in the Everglades, we will need to manage this ecosystem.
Managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District,
all restoration projects aim to improve the water quantity,
water quality,
timing of water delivery,
and water distribution.
Up until about the mid 1980s, water management was almost exclusively for human use.
So when the glades were the driest, we held water back even more.
And when the glades started to naturally re-wet, we started dumping the water.
So, it was almost 100% nest flooding every year.
If you solve the distribution across the ridge and slough landscape,
and you have nesting in the shorter hydroperiod marshes, you have it in the deeper hydroperiod marshes,
it doesn’t make as much difference if we have a really wet year or a really dry year.
I might have 80% success one year and 20% the next, but it is not 100% nest failure for multiple years.
(baby alligator squeaky grunts)
As the clock ticks for restoration, sea level also ticks upward.
Scientists predict sea level to rise as much as five feet by the year 2100.
At the upper projection, Everglades National Park facilities will be at sea level.
Low–lying islands would submerge.
Everglades biologists see the consequences of less freshwater from the north
and more saltwater from the coasts.
Mangroves and other coastal habitats are slowly migrating inland.
A key feature of the coastal Everglades are elevated ridges separating salty Florida Bay
from the interior freshwater marshes.
When the sea overtops these ridges, saltwater will flow into the freshwater sawgrass prairies
causing a major habitat transformation.
Increasing the flow of clean freshwater will make the Everglades more resilient and buﬀer
sea level rise by pushing back intruding saltwater.
Everglades restoration will also protect south Floridian’s main source of drinking water from saltwater intrusion.
There are already signs of success.
In September 2017, Hurricane Irma dumped a massive amount of freshwater onto south Florida.
(rain and wind)
Because some restoration projects were already complete, this water was free to flow into the park.
For the first time in many years, water was abundant in the southern Everglades.
The following Spring, wading birds gathered in breathtaking numbers to breed.
Biologists called them supercolonies.
Lori Oberhofer: We decided there were 10,000 Ibis nesting at the Broad River colony
and at least 15,000 at the Cabbage Bay colony.
We have not seen that kind of nesting at Everglades National Park since the 1940s.
(inspiring music)
So I’ve been monitoring wading birds for going on about 17 years now.
Wading birds are really resilient.
And, the sign that they are giving us is that,
if we get the water right, they will return.
Irma’s rainfall in combination with new ways of directing water into the park
led to the 2018 supercolonies.
After the high rainfall of 2020, the supercolonies returned in 2021.
(bird nest colony cacophony)
This influx of freshwater rejuvenated the estuaries along Florida’s southernmost coasts.
Florida Bay erupted with life.
The alligator is rebounding too.
We found almost 180 nests this year, the second highest we’ve ever recorded,
and the majority of those nests hatched successfully.
(baby alligator squeaky grunts)
Everglades restoration will stretch far into the future.
For all of us to thrive in south Florida, we need more freshwater flowing into the Everglades.
We also need more people to care about the Everglades.
What can you do?
Visit the Everglades.
Appreciate the Everglades.
Study the Everglades.
Learn more about Everglades Restoration.
We are working with our partners to make this dream a reality.
(upbeat music)