Smoke on the water: the interplay of fire and water flow on Everglades restoration

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America M people have written about the Everglades, but none have done so as elegantly as Marjorie Stoneman Douglass (1947): “There are no other Everglades in the world. They have always been one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under dazzling blue heights of space.” It is largely through Douglass’ efforts, and those of other local scientists and activists, that the federal and Florida state governments have committed to a 30-year, $8 billion restoration plan for the endangered ecosystem. This is an enormously complex endeavor and has no precedents. Efforts to complete the Everglades restoration are hampered by a lack of knowledge concerning the processes that govern the ecosystem and the need to accommodate a population of over 5 million people. Through systematic drainage and development over the past century, the Everglades has been nearly halved in size, with no chance of recovering the lost portion. Restoration scientists have understandably focused on how to reformulate water flows to better mimic natural conditions, thus preserving (and sometimes enhancing) the remaining wetlands. However, water is not the only force affecting ecosystem function in the Everglades. The massive thunderstorms that drive water flows also regularly serve to ignite fires, but the effects of these have been dramatically altered through changes in water flow and human population growth. Nevertheless, there has been little attempt to determine whether “getting the water right” – the mantra of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) – will also serve to “get the fire right”. Here we review the interaction between fire and water in the Everglades and consider how this interaction may influence the success of restoration, using the recovery of the endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus mirabilis) as an example.