Creation of a Digital Archive of Historical Aerial Photographs for Everglades NP and the Greater Everglades Ecosystem

The major products are planned as a series of USGS Open-File Reports, one for each complete, or near complete, set of photos. A photoset is defined as a collection of aerial photos that were taken during a discrete time, generally 30-60 days, with the same scale, film type, and camera. All OFRs will be distributed on CD-ROM and several on DVD. Each report will encompass a photoset with descriptive text sections such as Introduction, Metadata & Procedures, Study Area, and Acknowledgements. All scanned images will be in a downloadable format.

A foundation for Everglades restoration must include a clear understanding of the pre-drainage south Florida landscape. Knowledge of the spatial organization and structure of pre-drainage landscape communities such as mangrove forests, marshes, sloughs, wet prairies, and pinelands, is essential to provide potential endpoints, restoration goals and performance measures to gauge restoration success Information contained in historical aerial photographs of the Everglades can aid in this endeavor. The earliest known aerial photographs, from the mid to late 1920s, and resulted in the production of T-Sheets (Topographic Sheets) for the coasts and shorelines of south Florida. The T-Sheets are remarkably detailed, delineating features such as shorelines, ponds, and waterways, in addition to the position of the boundary between differing vegetation communities. If followed through time changes in the position of these ecotones could potentially be used to judge effects of changes in the landscape of the Everglades ecosystem, providing a standard by which restoration success can be ascertained. The overall objective is to create a digital archive of historical aerial photographs of Everglades national park and surrounding area of the greater Everglades and south Florida. The archive will be in readily available Geographic Information System formats for ease of accessibility. Each set of photos will be broadly disseminated to client agencies, academic institutions and the general public via Open-File Reports and through the Internet.