Monitoring South Florida’s Boundary Lands: A Hybridized Geospatial Approach
Earth Observation provides open-access environmental data essential for ecosystem revitalization efforts globally, including projects on the unprecedented scale of Everglades Restoration. Monitoring restoration projects associated with the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan helps align environmental policies with key ecosystem functions and shifting community goals. A robust yet conceptually ‘lightweight’ geospatial approach to understanding restoration impacts gave my interdisciplinary project a spatial context for understanding South Florida’s transformation.
As a case study, I implanted a multi-scalar land cover change analysis of the East Coast Buffer (ECB) region, an area critical for water storage, aquifer recharge, and habitat connectivity, juxtaposing the Miami Metropolitan area with the remaining natural areas. By integrating multi-sensor imagery to assess restoration activities using ESRI-based tools, GIS provides monitoring protocols that meet broader sustainability goals and consider stakeholder perspectives. Despite past efforts, public engagement remains limited, and long-term restoration outcomes are often hazy from the landscape perspective. This post covers the GIS-driven portion of my research that tracks restoration narratives using open-access spatial data to support holistic ecosystem monitoring.
Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV or ‘drone’) fieldwork region with three sites indicated by purple X. (a) UAV orthomosaic of the Pennsuco Wetlands with (b) Landsat imagery of identical area for resolution comparison
The East Coast Buffer: Conservation at the Urban Periphery
The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) established the ECB to protect urban water supplies and enhance Everglades water flow. Encompassing 5,730 hectares, the ECB includes state-managed and private properties still undergoing acquisition. Long-term plans for these zones remain uncertain, and without public involvement, restoration monitoring may remain disconnected from broader conservation efforts (SFWMD, 2006; Staletovich, 2021). Three field sites—the Pennsuco Wetlands, Frog Pond, and Mack’s Fish Camp—were chosen for drone surveys to offer updated insights into restoration efforts. This was helpful as it provided high-resolution imagery that acted as a way to ‘ground-truth’ the results of my remote sensing monitoring and to create 3D landscape models using photogrammetry. These buffer lands serve as ecological and cultural assets, supporting wildlife habitats and recreational access for local communities to explore wilderness in their backyards (Cronon, 1996).
East Coast Buffer zonation compared with Landsat imagery overlaid by buffer components
How Geospatial Tools Enhance Restoration Monitoring
Geospatial workflow: how datasets render the conditions observed across buffer sites of interest
I utilized ArcPro 3.2 to process and analyze spatial data, including the modeled outputs of imagery analysis coupled with existing land cover data provided by the National Park Service and the SFWMD. A hierarchical crosswalk reduced the ecological complexity of this comparison to seven fundamental land cover types for intuitive analysis. Using the Random Forest classifier in Google Earth Engine, the land cover composition for the East Coast Buffer region was classified for five time periods: 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020, using about two years of composited imagery data for each time slice.
My change detection analysis first involves dividing the ECB into nine distinct zones based on proximity to protected areas, existing buffer lands, and developed areas adjacent to Miami and their respective land use (e.g., Industrial, Residential, and Agricultural). After converting land cover rasters to vector data and using the Change Detection Wizard, land cover changes were evaluated according to their Weighted Rank Score (WRS) to recognize and compare fundamental shifts in the landscape structure. Incorporating high-resolution imagery via UAV and using Google Earth validated the prediction of the modeling time slices, with excellent agreement for most land cover types (Overall Agreement = 92.53%; Kappa = 0.91) This multi-scale approach helps researchers understand how restoration activities influence land cover broadly, with insights into priority species of vegetation and the role shifting hydrologic patterns play over time.
An ecological breakdown of the Weighted Rank Score based on shifts in landscape structure
Successes and Challenges in Restoration Monitoring
While some restoration activities, such as hydrologic alterations and invasive treatment, have led to the recovery of native communities, overall trends indicate challenges for reaching the original goals of Everglades restoration based on my analysis (SFERTF, 2022). For instance, Freshwater Marsh declined from 57% to under 50% in the study area while woody vegetation expanded. Open Water areas increased, but human-modified land cover slightly declined as some agricultural lands were restored.
Surprisingly, buffer areas showed a negative restoration trend compared to protected and urban areas, implying land cover transformation pathways are worth exploring. This is important because other experts warn that land use changes may be too advanced to restore historic Everglades hydrology, especially given climate change pressures.
WRS Trendline Comparison for Three Areas in the ECB Region
Towards Holistic Restoration Monitoring in the Greater Everglades
Conservation buffer zones play a vital role in Everglades restoration by acting as transitional spaces between natural and developed areas. Without consistent, multi-scale monitoring, policymakers may misinterpret or overlook restoration progress. Representation of the natural world will always undergo some form of sacrifice in their coverage, scale, or accuracy; thus, it remains crucial for those privileged to build and utilize these tools for conservation efforts to act intentionally in our research design and how results are communicated. Advanced Earth Observation technologies, including UAVs and high-resolution satellite imagery, will continue to refine restoration assessments alongside improving and disseminating geospatial workflow tasks while processing these data. As South Florida’s landscape evolves under the pressures from local environmental shifts alongside global climate change, ongoing adaptation in conservation strategies will be critical for maintaining ecosystem resilience and ensuring that restoration planning better tracks potential shift goals as portions of the Greater Everglades evolve into novel ecosystem states (Cosens & Gunderson, 2018).
REFERENCES
Cronon, W., (1996). The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Environmental History, 1(1), 7–28.
Cosens, B., & Gunderson, L. (2018). Practical Panarchy for Adaptive Water Governance. In Springer eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72472-0
South Florida Water Management District. (2006). East Coast Buffer: Land Management Plan. (Retrieved from https://www.sfwmd.gov/document/land-management-plan-east-coast-buffer-2006).
Staletovich, J. (2021, January 14). “It’s A Little Thumb Sticking Out In The Everglades” — And It’s Cost Taxpayers Millions in Flood Control. WLRN. https://www.wlrn.org/news/2021-01-14/its-a-littlethumb-sticking-out-in-the-everglades-and-its-cost-t... (accessed February 15th, 2021)
EvergladesRestoration.gov (SFERTF). October 19, 2022 - South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force Meeting [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcNujolqe00
Johnnie Sabin is an environmental anthropologist working at the interface of human-environment interactions and a recent doctoral graduate from East Carolina University.