Effects on the Florida Everglades

The unique natural wealth of lower Florida has excited the curiosity and imagination and has served the needs of man for at least twenty centuries. Its geographic setting still lures residents and tourists. Everglades National Park is at once a limited and a vast sampling of a region full of contrast. It is made up of adjacent, interrelated areas descriptively called the Florida Everglades, the Big Cypress country, the mangrove coast, the Ten Thousand Islands, …

…has been a major focus of the park’s research effort. The park has been facing troubles with fire lately too. Some caused by lightning and other natural forces, and others by arson. On May 29, 2000, two arson fires were simultaneously reported in the Mutual Threat Zone, an area designated by Memorandum of Agreement with Florida Division of Forestry and Miami Dade Fire Rescue. The fire burned a three hundred acre block of dense Australian pine.