debor042

  This post was written by guest blogger Emily Nodine, a PhD candidate in FIU's Periphyton Lab ( http://algae.fiu.edu/research/ ). When people think about today’s Everglades or the “River of Grass,” they generally think of Lake Okeechobee, Everglades National Park, and the canals and water control structures in between.  But the watershed is actually much larger than that.  Lake Okeechobee does serve as the headwaters of the Everglades; prior to human alteration, Lake Okeechobee would slowly overflow southward during very wet periods, forming the shallow, slow-flowing sheet of water that earned it the title “River of Grass.”  Today, the Hoover Dike prevents this and the water flow is strictly controlled, mostly released to the east and west coasts via the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Rivers, but also southward to the Everglades through an extensive system of canals and water control structures.  But the water in Lake Okeechobee came from somewhere else, too. Lak...

Our regular bloggers are out gathering data so today we have a guest blogger, Stephanie Long from the Department of Earth and Environment .  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Despite all of the extreme weather reporting and constant television coverage, Hurricane Isaac was just another storm for most of South Floridians. The only trouble the storm brought us was copious amounts of rain. So when I got a chance to go take samples along the L30 Levee just three days after the storm had passed, I was given a very fundamental lesson in South Florida hydrogeology. Fast moving water coming through  the L30 Levee and into the L30 Canal. Water Conservation Area 3B is FIU's nearest WCA neighbor. It is bordered by the Tamiami Canal to the south and the L30 Canal to the east. Three days after Isaac, the water in WCA 3B was pretty high; it even seemed to swamp the invasive cattail. We dr...

Tropical storm…… slow moving…….. heavy rain……. breezy……. Not the phrases you want to hear when you need to go deep into the Everglades and do a days worth of electrofishing before June ends.  Thanks to tropical storm Debby, I am going to have to sample in an orange tropical threat level!  One valuable lesson that I have learned over the few years that I have been doing field work is that if you wait till the last minute to sample,  super natural forces will make sure that your crucial sampling is impossible to finish.  Either something that you can’t fix will break, some plague will sweep through  your  lab making everyone too sick to help, or a tropical storm will park itself over south Florida. The weather report however does look less bad tomorrow. So we are going out! wooO!   Because of all this rain, freshwater will be racing off upstream marshes and pouring into the estuary, which maybe something that snook prefer.  Fast moving water might d...