The Everglades: A Food Web Diagram
Name
BIO/101
Date
Dr. Doreen Sterling
The Everglades: A Food Web Diagram
The Everglades is a two million acre wetland ecosystem. The Everglades reaches from central Florida, near Orlando, all the way south to Florida Bay (National Wildlife Federation, 1996-2013). During the wet season, Lake Okeechobee overflows, releasing water into a slow moving, shallow river. The river is mostly saw-grass marsh. The Everglades is an ecosystem that hosts a large diversity of habitats connected by wetlands and water bodies. Human actions have been altering the Everglades landscape through water diversions and flood control projects, and agricultural and urban development. How this affects the…show more content… Population Growth and regulation through community interaction
A century ago, the everglades were not appropriate for civilization because of frequent flooding and fires and swamp, which harbor plenty of mosquitoes. The year round warm weather and need of land for cultivation attracted human settlement and resulting further developments in the South Florida along the natural Everglades region. Increased population densities in the 1900s required construction of drainage activities to convert the wet-land for cultivation, agricultural expansion, and coastal railroad construction along with other economic activities, which altered the dynamics of the natural Everglades ecosystem (Solecki et al., 1999). Within half a century, more than half of the wet land was transformed into agriculture and urban use. The most community interactions that affect the Everglades ecosystem include land use, direct utilization, external inputs, and resource competition (Solecki et al., 1999). Land conversion for human settlement is the permanent and irreversible effect on natural landscape caused by community interaction. Many species lost their habitat because of the difficulty in adaptation to the human dominant environment. Major threats to the species in the Everglades comes from direct utilization of resources by the community, for example, hunting, fishing,
