Myakka River thrives with restored floodplain

Free-flowing rivers with natural fluctuations are essential for maintaining healthy ecosystems.

When a river is dammed, habitats, as well as the plant and animal species that depend upon them, are negatively affected.

In 2022, as part of efforts to restore the natural flow of the Wild and Scenic Myakka River, an exciting habitat restoration project began at the Upper Myakka Lake.

A critical part of this project was removal of a weir built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, and filling in a bypass channel through the floodplain marsh, which was created in 1974 in an attempt to mitigate the weir’s negative impact.

Importantly, healthy floodplain marshes benefit not only Myakka’s ecosystems, but our human communities, too, by absorbing excess water during floods, they reduce the risk of downstream flooding.

Vegetation and soil in floodplains also slows down floodwaters, preventing them from continuing to flow downstream to populated areas, where they can damage infrastructure.

Habitat restoration of a highly impacted area, especially floodplain marshes, which are seasonally underwater, takes time. Over the past few years, a habitat restoration exclusion zone, clearly defining the areas as off limits to park visitors, was established by the park.

This helped reduce continuous trampling by park visitors, which suppresses natural re-vegetation due to degradation of plant communities and soil compaction. Importantly, plant life in this area is essential not only for controlling erosion, but also for successfully restoring healthy habitats for our native wildlife, including insects, birds, and reptiles.

This spring, with undisturbed endemic native ground cover coming into its own, wildlife continued to favorably respond to the improved habitat, as well as to the protection provided by the restoration zones from human disturbance, with exciting results — to park visitors’ great delight, killdeer nesting efforts successfully produced chicks on both shores of the habitat restoration site for the very first time.

Like all plovers, killdeer nest on the ground. Of note, most successful nesting areas for this species have access to shallow water, which offers good feeding areas for newly hatched chicks. Myakka’s newly restored floodplain marshes now clearly fit the bill.