Hydrological drivers of wetland vegetation community distribution within Everglades National Park, Florida

Todd, M. Jason; Muneepeerakul, Rachata; Pumo, Dario; Azaele, Sandro; Miralles‐Wilhelm, Fernando; Rinaldo, Andrea; Rodrı́guez-Iturbe, Ignacio

doi:10.1016/j.advwatres.2010.04.003

Cited by 115 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Covering about 60% of the ENP area, sawgrass is by far the most abundant of all of the vegetation species of the ENP. Tall sawgrass and pine savanna currently occupy about 6% and 2% of the ENP, respectively, but their presence is strongly dependent on the hydroperiod regime (22), and in particular on the percentage of time the ground is inundated (PTI), because they are more abundant, respectively, in wetter and drier environments.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Habitat deterioration and land deprivation have been common problems for wetlands all over the world throughout the past century (12,24). Since the beginning of the 20th century, when the Everglades blocked the southward development of Florida, more and more of the wetlands were transformed to host the complex network of canals, dams, and levees necessary to meet growing agricultural needs, reducing the current Everglades to about half of its original size (11,22,25) and altering the vegetation and nutrient distribution (26)(27)(28).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Signs of critical transition in the Everglades wetlands in response to climate and anthropogenic changes

Foti

Jesús

Rinaldo

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The increasing pressure of climatic change and anthropogenic activities is predicted to have major effects on ecosystems around the world. With their fragility and sensitivity to hydrologic shifts and land-use changes, wetlands are among the most vulnerable of such ecosystems. Focusing on the Everglades National Park, we here assess the impact of changes in the hydrologic regime, as well as habitat loss, on the spatial configuration of vegetation species. Because the current structuring of vegetation clusters in the Everglades exhibits power-law behavior and such behavior is often associated with self-organization and dynamics occurring near critical transition points, the quantification and prediction of the impact of those changes on the ecosystem is deemed of paramount importance. We implement a robust model able to identify the main hydrologic and local drivers of the vegetation species spatial structuring and apply it for quantitative assessment. We find that shifts in the hydropatterns will mostly affect the relative abundance of species that currently colonize specific hydroperiod niches. Habitat loss or disruption, however, would have a massive impact on all plant communities, which are found to exhibit clear threshold behaviors when a given percentage of habitable habitat is lost.climate change impacts | ecohydrology | ecology | habitat vulnerability A s the interest surrounding wetlands and their fate has grown throughout the last decades, the impact of the increasing anthropogenic and climatic changes on their delicate ecosystem, and in particular on their vegetation dynamics, has been the subject of numerous studies (1-5). It was shown that the spatial organization of vegetation often arises from the interplay between local endogenous dynamics and global exogenous forces (6-9). In the Everglades National Park (ENP), in particular, such interplay is responsible for power-law clustering of vegetation species (10). Moreover, the ENP is a cradle where a large variety of rare and endangered species coexist within a fragile equilibrium, and the awareness of its importance has drawn attention to the extent that it is the focus of one of the most expensive restoration projects ever attempted (11-13). With these premises, it is of paramount importance to understand and quantify the potential impacts of habitat changes on the vegetation structuring of the Everglades ecosystem. ResultsThe modeling framework adopted in this study, which reveals the feedback between vegetation structures and hydrologic forces by incorporating the effects of exogenous drivers (i.e., hydropatterns) and endogenous mechanisms of plant interactions, was successfully used as a diagnostic tool for the analysis of the spatial configuration of plant communities in wetlands, with specific focus on the power-law clustering of vegetation patterns in the Everglades (10) (Materials and Methods). Such a modeling framework is based on a cellular automaton scheme ( Fig. S1 and SI Materials and Methods) applied over a 40-× 40-m study grid covering...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signs of critical transition in the Everglades wetlands in response to climate and anthropogenic changes

Foti

Jesús

Rinaldo

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Although hydroperiods have been defined in various ways (Ross et al 2003;Childers et al 2006;Givnish et al 2008;Zweig and Kitchens 2008;Todd et al 2010;LoGalbo et al 2013), they are usually calculated as annual means. In our study, use of environmentally-defined hydroperiods (the hydrologic interval) enlarged the hydrological description by allowing the length of the wet or dry event to extend over several years when appropriate.…”

Section: Effectiveness Of Hydrological Variables In Predicting Plant mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our spatially exhaustive quantitative approach to realized plant community optima and tolerances improves on prior descriptive approaches that relied on small numbers of measurements because it captures the entire range and distribution of hydrologic conditions in situ. Todd et al (2010) used a similar approach to explore vegetation/hydrology relations in Everglades National Park, FL, USA. Their correlations, however, were indirect because they superimposed vegetation classified at a 20 x 20 m scale on hydrologic grids that were 400 x 400 m, thus losing hydrological variation between communities within the 400 x 400 m cell.…”

Section: Plant Community Hydrology Descriptorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hydrology can be quantified in a number of ways; variables often include measures of depth and duration of wetness (hydroperiod), as well as flow rate. Typically, variables such as annual mean water depth or hydroperiod length are defined based on Julian years (January 1 to December 31), and data are summarized as averages across years (David 1996;Givnish et al 2008;Todd et al 2010). In seasonal wetland environments, however, such measures smooth out variations that may be important in defining differences among plant community types.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantitative Comparison of Plant Community Hydrology Using Large-Extent, Long-Term Data

Gann

Richards

2014

Wetlands

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Large-extent vegetation datasets that co-occur with long-term hydrology data provide new ways to develop biologically meaningful hydrologic variables and to determine plant community responses to hydrology. We analyzed the suitability of different hydrological variables to predict vegetation in two water conservation areas (WCAs) in the Florida Everglades, USA, and developed metrics to define realized hydrologic optima and tolerances.Using vegetation data spatially co-located with long-term hydrological records, we evaluated 7 variables describing water depth, hydroperiod length, and number of wet/dry events; each variable was tested for 2-, 4-and 10-year intervals for Julian annual averages and environmentally-defined hydrologic intervals. Maximum length and maximum water depth during the wet period calculated for environmentally-defined hydrologic intervals over a 4-year period were the best predictors of vegetation type. Proportional abundance of vegetation types along hydrological gradients indicated that communities had different realized optima and tolerances across WCAs. Although in both WCAs, the trees/shrubs class was on the drier/shallower end of hydrological gradients, while slough communities occupied the wetter/deeper end, the distribution of Cladium, Typha, wet prairie and Salix communities, which were intermediate for most hydrological variables, varied in proportional abundance along hydrologic gradients between WCAs, indicating that realized optima and tolerances are contextdependent.3

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Role of meteorological controls on interannual variations in wet‐period characteristics of wetlands

Liu

Kumar

2016

Water Resources Research

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Many ecological functions of wetlands are influenced by wet‐periods, i.e., the time interval when groundwater table (GWT) is continuously near the land surface. Hence, there is a crucial need to understand the controls on interannual variations of wet‐periods. Given the scarcity of long‐term measurements of GWT in wetlands, understanding variations in wet‐periods using a measurement approach alone is challenging. Here we used a physically based, fully distributed hydrologic model, in synergy with publicly available hydrologic data, to simulate long‐term wet‐period variations in 10 inland forested wetlands in a southeastern US watershed. A Bayesian regression and variable selection framework was then implemented to (a) evaluate the extent to which the simulated wet‐periods can be estimated and predicted by precipitation (Ppt) and potential evapotranspiration (PET) and (b) infer the relative roles of seasonal Ppt and PET. Our results indicate that wet‐period start date and duration could vary by more than 6 months during the 32 year simulation period. Remarkably, 60–90% of these variations could be captured using regressions based on seasonal Ppt and PET in most wetlands. Effects of seasonal meteorological conditions on wet‐period variations were found to be nonuniform, which indicate that the annual variables may not explain interannual variations in wet‐periods. The Bayesian framework was able to predict wet‐period variations with errors smaller than 1 month at a 90% confidence level. The presented framework provides a minimalistic approach for estimating and predicting wet‐period variations in wetlands and may be used to understand the future responses of associated ecological functions in wetlands.

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Hydrological drivers of wetland vegetation community distribution within Everglades National Park, Florida

Cited by 115 publications

References 14 publications

Signs of critical transition in the Everglades wetlands in response to climate and anthropogenic changes

Signs of critical transition in the Everglades wetlands in response to climate and anthropogenic changes

Quantitative Comparison of Plant Community Hydrology Using Large-Extent, Long-Term Data

Role of meteorological controls on interannual variations in wet‐period characteristics of wetlands

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