Cape Sable Water Quality and Suspended Sediment Data

The Cape Sable peninsula is located on the southwestern tip of the Florida peninsula within Everglades National Park (ENP). Lake Ingraham, the largest lake within Cape Sable, is now connected to the Gulf of Mexico and western Florida Bay by canals built in the early 1920’s. Some of these canals breached a natural marl ridge located to the north of Lake Ingraham. These connections altered the landscape of this area allowing for the transport of sediments to and from Lake Ingraham. Saline intrusion into the formerly fresh interior marsh has impacted the local ecology. Earthen dams installed in the 1950’s and 1960’s in canals that breached the marl ridge have repeatedly failed. Sheet pile dams installed in the early 1990’s subsequently failed resulting in the continued alteration of Lake Ingraham and the interior marsh. The Cape Sable Canals Dam Restoration Project, funded by ENP, proposes to restore the two failed dams in Lake Ingraham. The objective of this study was to collect discharge and water quality data over a series of tidal cycles and flow conditions to establish discharge and sediment surrogate relations prior to initiating the Cape Sable Canals Dam Restoration Project. A dry season synoptic sampling event was performed on April 27-30, 2009.

(Source: Zucker, M. and Boudreau, C. 2010. Sediment Transport on Cape Sable, Everglades National Park, FL. Joint Federal Interagency Conference. <http://sofia.usgs.gov/publications/papers/sedtrans_csable/index.html>)