Stormwater Treatment Area (STA) - Vegetation (2002)

The South Florida Water Management District (District or SFWMD) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have built six large treatment wetlands, referred to as Stormwater Treatment Wetlands (STAs), in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) as part of a State and Federal initiative to protect the Everglades (Chimney and Goforth, 2001; Sklar et al., 2005). These treatment wetlands are intended to reduce high phosphorus concentrations in surface runoff coming from the EAA before this water reaches the northern portion of the present-day Everglades, i.e., the Water Conservations Areas. Each STA is subdivided into a number of treatment cells by interior levees. Treatment wetlands reduce the concentration of water-borne pollutants through natural bio-geochemical processes (Kadlec and Wallace, 2009). Wetland biogeochemistry, in turn, is intimately associated with the extent and condition of the wetland’s vegetation community (Reddy and DeLaune, 2009). Because of the important relationship between wetland treatment performance and vegetation, the vegetation communities in the STAs have been monitored throughout their operational histories. This effort was mandated as a condition of STA operating permits and by the Process Development and Engineering section of the District’s Long Term Plan (Burns & McDonnell, 2003). The vegetation communities in the STAs have been monitored using two different approaches: (1) vegetation maps were prepared for each STA based on the spatial distribution of different vegetation types interpreted from aerial photographs and (2) field surveys were conducted at a network of sites within each wetland to catalog plant taxa and assess vegetation areal coverage of the dominant taxa. The field-survey program was initiated as a cost-effective alternative to mapping for characterizing the plant community. For more information please access this report from here: STA Vegetation Analysis The 2002 Vegetation Map Report can be accessed from here: 2002 STA Vegetation Map Report For more details in how the data was processed please see the Lineage section.