Managing South Florida’s Ecosystems for People, Plants, and Panthers, Cassondra Armstrong, S. FL WMD

Details

The south Florida watershed is composed of 16 counties, more than nine million people, thousands of kilometers of canals and levees, eight distinct natural ecosystems, nearly 24,000 hectares of constructed treatment wetlands and growing, 11 estuaries, and over 560 km of coral reefs. The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) monitors and manages every drop of water as it moves into and through the system. The SFWMD has three management responsibilities; flood protection, water supply, and protection and restoration of ecosystems. Each separately and together require complex management decisions to balance competing needs. Lake Okeechobee is the heart of the system. Water flows south from Orlando down the Kissimmee River into the Lake and then flows east to the St. Lucie Estuary, west to the Caloosahatchee Estuary, and south to the Everglades and Florida Bay. At each point, water managers decide the quantity and timing of flow. The Lake is jointly managed by the SFWMD and US Army Corps of Engineers using the Lake Okeechobee System Operation Manual (LOSOM) adopted in 2024. It was developed with consideration of flood risk, navigation, water supply, lake ecology, and estuarine salinity. Water that flows south must first be sent to stormwater treatment areas (STAs), which are constructed treatment wetlands designed to reduce the concentration of phosphorus to ultra-low levels to assist with the restoration of the Everglades. Everglades restoration is guided by the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) implemented in 2000. Projects are being built throughout the system to improve the quantity, quality, timing, and distribution of flow. Each project has an environmental monitoring plan to document project objectives are being obtained. In addition, CERP has a system wide REstoration, COordination, VERification (RECOVER) monitoring program that tracks total ecosystem health as CERP projects come online.

Dr. Armstrong has worked for the SFWMD for 12 years as a senior scientist, supervisor, section administrator, and now bureau chief of the Applied Sciences Bureau. Her areas of expertise include wetland ecology, coastal ecology, water quality, and treatment wetlands. Prior to working at the District, she was a contractor with the District studying prescribed fire as a restoration tool for the nutrient-impacted areas of the Everglades. And prior to that, she did her Post Doc at NASA Kennedy assessing management implications on salt marsh function and longevity and associated impacts to the Indian River Lagoon.