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Recording: Integrating Sea Level Rise Scenarios into Everglades Restoration Planning

April 24, 2025

Wednesday, June 18 at 1pm ET
via Zoom

Abstract:

One of the world’s largest and most expensive restoration efforts is occurring in the Everglades, a subtropical freshwater wetland system in southern Florida. This unique ecosystem provides flood control for Florida’s large urban population, provides water for both agriculture and drinking, and supports several endangered species.

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), authorized by Congress in 2000, guides federal, state, and local efforts to build the infrastructure necessary to bring more water into the Everglades and restore its ecological integrity, while balancing other water-related needs such as water supply and flood protection in the human environment.

The Everglades encompasses the southern coast of Florida, and restoration efforts are likely to be impacted by climate-induced sea level rise. However, currently, many project planning studies do not formally incorporate the potential impacts of sea level rise when evaluating restoration plan outcomes. Resource managers and project planners require methods and tools to confidently incorporate scenarios of sea level rise into their evaluations.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and partners from the University of Florida worked with project planners from multiple agencies to identify restoration questions for consideration when addressing sea level rise. In addition, our project team sought to understand the types of sea level rise decision-support tools that would be of interest and then worked with Everglades restoration managers and project planners to develop those tools. The tools developed by this project can be used by project planners to inform their decision-making abilities when considering multiple restoration plans across the Everglades landscape. Specifically, the novel ways to visualize output information from ecological models that came from this project can help project planners compare alternative restoration plans that include potential sea level rise impacts. This effort demonstrates how incorporating sea level rise scenarios into Everglades restoration project planning can help managers decide whether projects will maintain or improve ecological integrity and evaluate water availability for wildlife and humans.

Speakers:

Laura E. D’Acunto, PhD

Laura is a quantitative ecologist at the USGS Wetland and Aquatic Research Center in Gainesville, Florida. They develop decision support tools (including models and visualization) that assist natural resource managers in understanding the potential ecological impacts of an uncertain future. Their current work focuses on developing tools, visualizations, and ecological models for coastal wetland ecosystems such as the Everglades and the Louisiana coast.