Does anyone know where I can find information/data documenting the loss of native Floridian ecosystems, including mangrove islands, wetlands (marshes and swamps), pine flatwoods (both long leaf pine with wire grass and slash pine with palmetto), temperate hardwood forest and mesic hammocks. thanks!
Perhaps Jack Ewel (formerly UF Botany now in Hawai'i ) would have some insights or references . Ariel Lugo too... both formerly taught at UF and Lugo once lectured us on the history of Paynes Prairie... They seemed to have based their new management strategy in the late 70's on restoration to a particular historical moment. Maybe some of the references for that would be useful?
I found this book a great overview of change in the Everglades, and a cracking good read:
THE SWAMP: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise
By Michael Grunwald
Illustrated. 450 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27.
State by state losses in wetlands can be found on the US Fish and Wildlife services web site; forest loss and grassland loss can be found in the natural heritage data based by comparing land cover from origional land survey records (maps) with USGS and more recent land cover mapping.
Don't forget the native understory, the wildflowers and native grasses.
Unless you also include the native understory, you will be missing a big part of the picture of change. For example, for our forests in California they still occupy a lot of their original ranges, but for the native plant understory in those forests--the native grasses and wildflowers--are almost completely gone.
If you conduct a simple mile-by-mile roadside vegetation transect like I did here in the West at http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect you can get an idea of the percentage of the native understory that still exists. I noted if the wildflowers and/or native grasses were present at each post mile along the routes I traveled. It took about three weeks to cover the 2,000 miles of megatransect route.
It would be very valuable to do a similar roadside megatransect in Florida, because nobody has every done anything like that, and the data for each post-mile would be a reference for the future, where anyone could repeat the route and see the changes over time.
In most of California the native understory is less than 1/10th of 1%. A few years ago, I conducted a mile-by-mile megatransect in Georgia and Maryland and got similar results, the native understory was mostly gone due to grazing or plowing.
Worldwide most of the native understory in terms of the non-grass plants like wildflowers are gone also, as you can see from the photos at http://www.confluence.org.
The rule of thumb is when wildflowers should be blooming in your area of study, and if you do not see them when you run your megatransect, then the native understory is damaged or absent on that spot, and is noted as "not seen" for that area.
Like the human census we usually conduct in most nations every 10 years, we should be going out and conducting roadside megatransects every 10 years, so we can get an idea of the environmental changes in the natural environment that are happening?
There are a variety of sources at different scales geographically with varying accuracy to answer your question. If you want statewide estimates I recommend Myers an Ewel Ecosystems of Florida. I have work on this for the Charlotte Harbor portion of southwest Florida. The ecosystems section of the South Florida Multi-Species Recovery Plan is a good location for information for the area south and flanking lake Okeechobee inlcuding the Everglades, Big Cypress and the Keys See http://www.fws.gov/verobeach/ListedSpeciesMSRP.html .
I like this picture....(attached).
When you couple the picture with a view of google maps, it looks like ~50% reduction in area. Also, I agree with Jim Beever's response.
With the current 1000 per day pop. increase the 50% figure will undoubtedly soon change. Myers and Ewel requires an update. Best to contact then directly.
A second map is attached.
This map used a 2006 USGS layer that identifies land uses and characterizes patches of land as converted/natural at a 30m x 30m pixel scale. Each pixel is consolidated into a few groups as a layer.
The question that was posed is hard to address directly. Historical maps of landscape types define areas differently than we tend to today (although Harshberger 1914 did a good job at keeping the definitions simple). The bottom line is that I can't answer the question for each habitat type (and I have tried fairly hard to do this), but there are clear differences - pine rocklands are ~95% gone, freshwater wetlands are ~50% reduced in the main Everglades flowpath, pond apple swamps in Okeechobee are gone, coastal mangroves are intact in Everglades (and have expanded due to storms and sea-level rise), and this list can get quite a bit longer.
The approach I recommend is get a historical map. Overlay the USGS layers (NPScape is the name of the National Park Service process that accumulates USGS information for the surrounding area of each National Park Unit). Calculate the differences at a coarse scale (I used a 2x4 km grid), and present the result as a graphic. Tabulating the results requires a lot of focus on uncertainty and developing range estimates. The bottom line is - uplands are developed, wetlands are reduced, the coast and agricultural areas are intensively developed.
The effects on organisms are species-specific. And there are lots of caveats required to support a general description of how things have changed.
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