Paving a way forward: FGCU’s role in a Collier County restoration project
- Laurie D. Babcock
- November 21, 2024
- The Water School at FGCU
- Contributors: Laurie Babcock, Photos | Chris Noonan, Video
6 – minute read
Bouncing slowly down a rutted Naples dirt road in his pickup truck, Florida Gulf Coast University professor Win Everham foresees a unique future for Collier County.
“Any other place in Florida, arguably, if you’re on a dirt road, you can look forward 10 to 20 years and this road will be paved — that’s just the future of the South Florida landscape,” says the professor of ecology and environmental studies in The Water School.
His truck lurches and bucks violently with every pothole and furrow. Ahead, an all-terrain vehicle searches for the best path through road-width pools of water. What would be sidewalks in the future Everham outlined are overgrown with tall grass as untamed clusters of saw palmetto encroach from the edges.
Twenty years ago, this road was paved and on its way to being the main thoroughfare for sprawling real estate development.
“And 20 years from now, this road won’t be here anymore,” Everham says. It seems inevitable that nature will reclaim this road — one of many returning to a natural state in the Picayune Strand State Forest.
The site of a failed real estate scheme in Collier County, the forest is now a cornerstone of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). According to the National Park Service, CERP was authorized by Congress in 2000 as a plan to “restore, preserve and protect the South Florida ecosystem while providing for other water-related needs of the region, including water supply and flood protection.”
The Picayune Strand Restoration Project, part of CERP, aims to restore 55,000 acres of Everglades habitat in the state forest. Significant progress has been made since 2007, and Everham estimates it’s more than 70% complete.
Home to diverse wildlife, including the Florida panther and wood storks, the area is being transformed from a grid of asphalt roads and deep canals back into a thriving ecosystem. In 20 years, as Everham predicts, this road will likely be washed away as restoration efforts return water flows to their natural patterns.
“The idea that this is going back to the way it was is so beautiful to me because we’re just not doing it anywhere else,” Everham says. “And certainly not on the scale of tens of thousands of acres, right?”
FGCU research in Picayune
With permission from the Florida Forest Service, FGCU faculty and students play a key role in researching Picayune’s restoration. Everham got involved early in the project when a former colleague helped set up baseline monitoring in the state forest before the four main canals were filled in. Since then, he’s been continuously involved in monitoring the fish, frogs and insects — a sensitive metric for a wetland’s health. He and his students compare data from multiple Picayune sites to reference points in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge and the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve.
Charley Vance, an environmental science grad student, is Everham’s fifth graduate student studying the impacts of restoration efforts in Picayune. His research is supported by The Everglades Foundation.
“When we talk about the health and stability of an ecosystem, we often think about it in terms of ecological resilience, or how tough the system is,” Vance says. They are interested in how well a system can withstand an event like a hurricane or wildfire — or, in the case of Picayune, real estate development — and recover from that change.
Southwest Florida’s regional university
FGCU researchers aren’t the only ones working in Picayune Strand. As Everham drives down the dirt road, Mike Knight, a biologist with the Florida Forest Service, approaches from the opposite direction. Knight stops to ask if Everham and Vance can look for evidence of black rails, a bird slightly smaller than a sparrow and listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Scientists are eager to confirm the marsh bird’s return to the state forest, and Everham quickly agrees.
“I feel like our job at FGCU is to meet research needs in the region, and sometimes that means helping to meet the research needs of our partners,” Everham says.
“There’s a lot of people in my field who think of humans as the problem. ‘If we could just get rid of humans, everything would be better,’” Everham says. “But it’s my species. I’m glad I’m here. We just need to do a better job of figuring out how to fit this in.”
Picayune is unique, according to Everham. “I don’t know any place else in Florida — any place else in the world — where they were well down a path of putting in a community for maybe hundreds or thousands of people and then stopped. And then someone else said, ‘Let’s dig up the roads and fill in the canals.’ I think the decision was brilliant, ecologically.”
He’d like to know the names of those involved in deciding to buy up the land: “I’d love to buy a beer for whoever it was.”
For researchers like Everham, this isn’t just about restoring a piece of land. It’s about appreciating the environment and those committed to working with, rather than against, nature.
“It’s important to all of us who live in Southwest Florida to understand development is continuing, and we should want to be a part of what is good, healthful, sustainable development.”
