debor042

Mike Bush is a guest blogger and a PhD student in the Trexler aquatic ecology lab at FIU ( http://faculty.fiu.edu/~trexlerj/ ).  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                 Everglades restoration can come in many forms, from ensuring that water heading south through the Everglades Agricultural Area is stripped of excess nutrients before it hits the more natural areas of the Everglades to shuffling around huge amounts of water under Alligator Alley into Fakahatchee Strand. Perhaps no project is as ambitious as the Water Conservation Area 3A Decompartmentalization and Sheetflow Enhancement Project (we just refer to it as “DPM” or “Decomp” for short, thank goodness). DPM is a multifaceted project, with major involvement by the South Florida Water Management District and the US Army Corps of Engineers, that focuses on removing lev...

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...