Professor FlaSoxxJim

[Texsox]

Could you discuss the short, medium, and long term impact this hurricane season will have on Florida and the coastal areas? I've been looking for the environmental forcast but it seems the media is only interested in finding food and water

[southsider2k5]

Actually I was thinking about the affects on the everglades. I remember hearing about how dangerously low the water levels were from the cities using the water. Could this be a good thing for southern Florida, in a horrible sort of way?

[Texsox]

Actually I was thinking about the affects on the everglades.  I remember hearing about how dangerously low the water levels were from the cities using the water.  Could this be a good thing for southern Florida, in a horrible sort of way?

I remember Jim mentioning some species use these types of events to extend their range. I believe coral was one example. They can move great distance by getting caught up in a hurricane.

[Steff]

Actually I was thinking about the affects on the everglades.  I remember hearing about how dangerously low the water levels were from the cities using the water.  Could this be a good thing for southern Florida, in a horrible sort of way?

I just watched CSI: Miami last night.. things look fine down there to me..

[FlaSoxxJim]

I will give thisd some thought and respond tonight in some detail - IF my on-again, off-again power comes back on to let me do so (calling in from the road now).

 

Short answer, any systems that are impacted by human water diversion (including the Everglades) are going to be really out of whack after the emergency floodgates are open. Also any naturally oligotrophic (designed for low nutrient input) systems are going to get a very large pulse of nutrient-rich effluent - this includes the Everglades as well.

[FlaSoxxJim]

OK, here's a general answer to the question.

 

One thing to remember is that even a whacked 4-hurricane season like this year is a natural event not unheard of on short-term adaptive evolutionary scales (1,000s to 10,000s of years), even if it has only happened rarely in recent human history.

 

That being the case, there is no native Florida ecosystem that would not survive and recover from these major stochastic events - unless they were very small and rare systems and they took a direct hit the effectively knocked them out of existence (Florida relict dune scrub systems might be an example. 90% of this already rare ecosystem has been lost to development, so it is conceivable that the remaining fragments could be lost to a major stochastic event if all the fragments took direct hits).

 

The real issues are that Florida's ecosystems are non-natural, stressed systems and our efforts to manage storm-induced floodwaters typically take these systems further away from a natural state in which the would be most resiliant to natural storm disturbance. And now that we all have hurricanes on the brain, it is almost certain we will try to make the state more 'hurricane-proof' from a human standpoint at the expense of the natural systems.

 

A good analogy is the last 80 years of fire management (mis-management) in the US. Decades of fire suppression in forested areas that are not only naturally fire tolerant but actually fire dependent have been kept burn free because Smokey the Bear convinced everybody that all fires were bad. The result is that forest age structures have become greatly skewed, fuel levels have built up to disastrous levels, and now when we do get wildfires they are devastating because we have kept all the little mediating fires from thinning the forests etc.

 

In response to tehse hurricanes, we will no doubt redouble efforts at beach stabilization. And in reality, beaches are supposed to be anything but stable of course. We will also redouble our efforts to ditch, drain, and control surface water flows, chanellizing the sheet-flow that the Everglades need to be healthy, and diverting way too much nutrient-laden freshwater into natrally oligotrophic (low input) systems.

 

As for SS2K4's question about this possibly being a temporary bood to the Glades, freshwater volume is only part of the story. The water is also supposed to be almost nutrient-free, and stormwater runnoff is anything but. That is the heart of the problem with Big Sugar - they dump LOTS of water into the Everglades, but it is a couple orders of magnitude more nutrient-enrished than the system is designed to receive.

 

So, bottom line, these storms - like fires, doughts and other stochastic environmental events - are nothing that the native Florida systems are not evolved to respond o and recover from. Some habitat pockets would be destroyed, others set back to earlier successional stages etc., but they would recover and, more importantly, it would help maintain the spatial and temporal mosaic of habittat patches of various ages and physical condition typical of healthy natural ecosystems. The real danger is that systems just barely hanging on and not entirely functional can get knocked for a loop. Especially in our modern, exotic-plagued state, invasive species like Brazilian pepper and melaleuca will move into impacted areas and get a foothold. And as mentioned, we'll probably respond to the hurricanes with still more overmanagement of natural systems for our comfort, and the systems will suffer.

 

[/lecture]

[DBAHO]

So all round it's pretty much bad news for the ecosystems and wildlife in Florida. I have never seen a hurricane down here, let alone 4 hurricanes in 1 season, that's just amazing really.

 

Loved the Smokey the Bear reference too there Jim.

[southsider2k5]

Thanks for the info Jim. Now I just have to find a dictionary...

[kapkomet]

FlaxxJimbo!

 

 

I remember when we went on one of those airboat whirlly dealies (see, my language is a lot different then yours, hehe) they were talking about the efforts to actually let the everglades gain back some of their water tables from years past. One of the biggest contributions was a non-native tree that was brought over that sucks up all the water in the everglades. They are now going back in and trying to kill the tree, but it is extremely difficult to do so because the spores on the tree spawn new trees very quickly.

 

So, is that partly why the everglades are losing water, and of course combine that with the advancement of drainage efforts so we can build our houses on what used to be swampland... ugh...

 

When a hurricane (or two or three of them) comes along and dumps all that water in there, it's naturally polluted, right? The habitats, from what I see you say above, can recover and in fact there can be some new habitats formed because of the shift in the ecological system...

 

This is some pretty cool discussions.

[Texsox]

Sounds like an opportunity to write a journal article.

 

I remember back in the mid 90s when we had two floods of the century within a couple years of each other. It impacted the Fox chain the most Much of the problem was in the dams that held water back from the Mississippi.

[FlaSoxxJim]

Yeah Kap, that tree you're talking about is the melaleuca I had noted (also called paper tree or punk tree, a native of DHABO's neck of the world and a very nice tree in it's rightful place.

 

You're right, they were brought into Florida to help deain the swamps (originally by a freaky religious group called the Koreshians in the late 1800s - There is some biblical connection to David Koresh of Branch Dividian infamy but I don't recall it). And some clown in the 1930s broadcast the seeds all over the Everglades to help drain all that 'useless swampland.' We've been trying to undo that mistake ever since.

 

As far as stormwater being "naturally polluted" - well it picks up all the nutrient and other wastes as it runs off the land into receiving bodies. The Everglades evolved under a low nutrient input regime, and so all that nutrient-laden water is a problem.

[Texsox]

It is hard to believe how ignorant people are/were about introducing non-native species.

[kapkomet]

Sorr for my ignorance. So the everglade natural habitat (water) is LOW in nuetrients? I would think the other way around... ???

[Texsox]

Sorr for my ignorance.  So the everglade natural habitat (water) is LOW in nuetrients?  I would think the other way around... ???

Not enough kids swimming in it Hmm, that water sure is warm all of a sudden

[FlaSoxxJim]

Sorr for my ignorance.  So the everglade natural habitat (water) is LOW in nuetrients?  I would think the other way around... ???

It's one of those seeming paradoxes, but yes, the water in the heart of a (now mythical) pristine Everglades would be very low in dissolved nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. The basic natural system would take sheet flow (overland, not channelized) natural stormwater that is relatively high in nutrients from the Kissemmee and Okeechobee drainage systems to the north. Then Marjorie Stineman Diouglas' archetypal "river of grass" would filter the nutrients out of that sheet flow so that the water entering the south Everglades was almost entirely stripped of nutrients. That very clean water flowed into Florida Bay, to the Keys, and ultimately past the Keys reef tract. Being naturally low in nutrients, this did not eutrophy (over fertilize) any of these low nutrient systems (the reefs being the quintessential oligotrophic system, in which tight nutrient cycling and symbiotic associations allow diversity to thrive despite (actually because of) the nutrient impoverished environment.

 

The Everglades of today is managed hydrologically for agriculture and for human inhabitants and a lot of that classic natural filtering function is disrupted. Water that would be feeding the entire system is diverted to the sugar plantations and when that water leaves the farms it is very high in nutrients instead of very low. Furthermore, ditching to allieviate a lot of seasonal flooding of lowlying inhabited areas means instead of a slow trip to Florida Bay, the hypernutrified water flows much more rapidly an bypasses most of the natural clensing Everglades grasses in the process.