Introduction

Home to a diverse mixture of Caribbean and temperate flora, the keystone American alligator, the Florida panther, and hundreds of thousands of nesting and overwintering wading birds, the Everglades has long been recognized as one of the world’s special places. Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1947) successfully focused national attention on the Everglades one-half century ago when she described its natural and cultural history in her book, The Everglades: R iver o f Grass. In that same year, Everglades National Park opened to the public. The park’s role as protector of a portion of the Everglades has been internationally recognized through its designation as an International Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site, and a Ramsar Convention Wetland of International Importance. However, Everglades National Park includes only one-fifth of the original river of grass that once encompassed more than one million hectares. Nearly half of the Everglades has been drained for agriculture and development. The marsh that remains upstream of Everglades National Park is mostly dissected into shallow, diked impoundments known as Water Conservation Areas, where the South Florida Water Management District controls levels and flows in efforts to balance environmental concerns with the needs of a burgeoning human population (Plate 1).* From a broad perspective, changes in the Everglades ecosystem during the 20th century have been threefold. The geographic extent of the system has been reduced. The spatial and temporal patterns of the major physical driving forces such as hydrology, fire, and nutrient supply have been altered in the remaining system. Abundance of wildlife has declined. Most conspicuous and alarming among the biological changes have been the plummeting of Everglades wading bird populations to less than one-fifth of their abundance during the 1930s and the near extinction of the Florida panther.