Projects:

Scope of Projects

ELM 1km regional app

ELM 500m regional app

ELM-subregional apps

ELM subregional applications

The subregional applications span a range of localized areas or hydrologic basins within the greater Everglades regional system. Depending on the objectives of the particular project, the spatial and temporal scales vary widely.

Here we provide a brief overviews of two of our more recently developed subregional applications: one for restoration planning in a northern Everglades impoundment, and one for gaining research insights into the interactions between landscape patterns and ecosystem processes in a 'pristine' central Everglades Ridge & Slough habitat. As both continue to undergo refinements, the applications have not yet been publicly-released for formal project planning applications.

Water Conservation Area 1 (WCA-1)

For this model application at 200 m grid resolution, we made a number of enhancements to the model capabilities, beyond those of the regional ELM v2.5. Included in this project's objectives is a model analysis of alternative management strategies for hydropattern restoration in WCA-1, while improving current levels of water quality. Funding for this research and application (extension) project is from the Everglades Research Division, South Florida Water Management District.

Further research and model refinement is ongoing, with the figures below indicating some of the hydrologic and water quality performance characteristics of the model (which exceed the performance of the regional ELM v2.5 application).
 



Animated visualizations
While rigorous comparisons of simulated to observed data at points along gradients are important in demonstrating model performance, 2D and 3D animations provide a rich amount of information on the model capabilities.


Quicktime movie (MPEG 19.1 mb) ELMwca1 v2.8 simulated surface water chloride (tracer) concentrations in WCA-1, under the 'Lake Okeechobee Regulation Schedule 2007' (LORS07) Baseline (i.e., not restoration) run for future water management plans. Chloride is assumed to be conservative, and thus not "absorbed" or "released" by the marsh during its transport across the marsh - thus, the highly dynamic water flows can be "traced" to and from the canal that encircles the entire interior perimeter of the hydrologic basin. Each frame is a 30-d mean value of surface water chloride concentration, spanning the 438 intervals of the 1965-2000 climate inputs.

(Note: 1965-2000 dates denote the use of historical climate data, which were used as inputs to model simulations of future system responses to future management operations, under historical climate 'drivers' (i.e., what would have happened from 1965-2000 if the system had been operated under the new simulated management rules). The South Florida Water Management District's SFWMM generated the LORS07 managed water control structure flows that were inputs to this ELM simulation run).

Ridge & Slough Pattern & Process

In a research effort to elucidate some of the interactions between Everglades ecosystem processes (e.g., water flows, plant mortality, soil oxidation) and landscape patterns (e.g., anisotropic pattern of ridges of vegetation alongside deeper sloughs), we are refining some fine-scaled ELM applications.

The following slides give a preview of some of the basics behind the use of some fine-scaled ELM applications to explore these landscape pattern-process interactions.