There are precious few landscapes in America as impressive as the Everglades.The Everglades is a subtropical wetland ecosystem spanning two million acres across central and south Florida. During the wet season, Lake Okeechobee overflows, releasing water into a very slow moving, shallow river dominated by sawgrass marsh—dubbed the "river of grass." The water flows southward, passing through diverse habitats, including cypress swamps, wet prairie, and mangroves, until it reaches Everglades National Park and eventually Florida Bay.

Originally the Greater Everglades ecosystem had a large diversity of habitats connected by wetlands and water bodies. Since the 1800s, humans have been altering the Everglades landscape. Water diversions and flood control structures restrict the flow of water across the sensitive landscape. Combined with agricultural and urban development, the size of the Everglades has decreased dramatically, affecting the quality of habitats in the area.

Tragedy of The Commons

The tragedy of the commons is a term coined by British economist William Forster Lloyd in 1833. In a pamphlet, Lloyd illustrated a hypothetical wherein a shared resource is gradually depleted by human beings acting solely in their own interest. Lloyd used the example of a common property (or “commons”) shared by local communities where herdsman led their cattle to graze. If each herdsman acted in an economically rational way based solely on their own wellbeing, they would each allow more than their fair share of cattle to graze on the land, thus leading to overuse.

Our society has traditionally operated under the assumption that with a bit of regulation, the human drive to act in our own self-interest will lead to healthy competition. But when it comes to shared resources, this competition can lead to a depletion of common goods and resources, resulting in a phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons.

Degradation and Shrinking of the Everglades

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, large areas of Florida's Everglades were drained for agricultural and urban development. That development has dramatically changed natural habitat and threatens the existence of many unique plants and animals. Today, more than half of the original Everglades have been drained, primarily for agricultural development. Water now flows through a highly managed system of canals and levees in greatly altered flow patterns. A major concern is the impact that drainage waters from agricultural land have on the Everglades ecosystem.

Phosphorus in agricultural and stormwater runoff has degraded water quality in the Everglades since the 1960s. The natural plant and animal communities for which the Everglades are known developed under very low phosphorus conditions. High phosphorus causes impacts in the Everglades such as loss of the natural communities of algae that are defining characteristics of the Everglades, loss of water dissolved oxygen that fish need changes in the native plant communities that result in a loss of the open water areas where wading birds feed.

By 1990 over 40,000 acres of the public Everglades were estimated to be impacted. Better water quality will support tourism, recreation, and wildlife, and protect the Everglades for future generations. Extensive efforts were initiated in the 1990s to protect the Everglades from further degradation caused by phosphorus. Farmers have implemented best management practices to reduce phosphorus before the water leaves the farm.The State and Federal governments have constructed about 57,000 acres of treatment wetlands (called Stormwater Treatment Areas, or STAs) that remove phosphorus before the water is discharged into the Everglades. This $1 billion effort to treat large volumes of water down to the very low phosphorus level (10 parts per billion) that is needed to protect all of the Everglades is an unprecedented restoration effort. The STAs have permits required under the Clean Water Act that limit how much phosphorus can be discharged.

Environmental Monitoring in the Everglades

EPA has been conducting an assessment of the Everglades’ health over the last 20 years. The Everglades Regional Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program, or REMAP (also referred to as the Everglades Ecosystem Assessment Program), measures current and changing conditions for water quality and ecological resources. This program is the only scientific effort in the Everglades that combines:

a probability-based sampling approach, which permits quantitative spatial statements about ecosystem health
an extensive 2000 square mile coverage that includes all of the Everglades
a multi-media aspect (water, sediment, fish, algal communities, and plants such as sawgrass and cattail).

Our Solution - Everglades Ecosystem Assessment Dashboard

Everglades Ecosystem Assessment Phase IV: 2014 Report provides Mercury contamination, Phosphorus, Sulphate for 119 locations. But there is no convenient way to view this data. We created a dashboard to view the assessment data easily.