Everglades Restoration Reaches a Milestone Year as Scientists Complete Biennial Review

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is completing the eleventh biennial review of Everglades restoration progress this month, a congressionally mandated assessment that has tracked the effort since the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan was authorized by the Water Resources Development Act of 2000.

The review arrives as state officials report significant milestones. Governor Ron DeSantis announced that all federally funded contracts for the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir project have been executed, which the state has described as occurring five years ahead of schedule. The South Florida Water Management District has separately reported that recent investments tripled water storage capacity in South Florida.

The district's 2026 South Florida Environmental Report documented restoration and engineering work across the Kissimmee Basin, Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades and coastal areas, and noted that Florida Bay reached salinity targets for the first time in decades.

What the restoration is trying to fix

The Everglades historically functioned as a shallow sheet of water moving slowly southward from the Kissimmee River chain through Lake Okeechobee and across a vast sawgrass plain to Florida Bay. That flow, sometimes described as a river of grass, sustained an ecosystem adapted to seasonal wet and dry cycles.

Twentieth-century engineering fundamentally altered that system. Canals, levees and water control structures built for flood protection and to enable agriculture and urban development in South Florida diverted water east and west to the coasts, compartmentalized the remaining wetlands and disrupted the timing and volume of flows.

Roughly half of the original Everglades was lost to development and agriculture, and what remained functioned poorly. Wading bird populations collapsed, water quality degraded from nutrient loading, and coastal estuaries received damaging pulses of fresh water during wet periods while Florida Bay suffered from insufficient freshwater delivery.

How the restoration plan works

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan is a framework of dozens of individual projects intended to capture water that is currently discharged to the ocean, store it, clean it and deliver it south at appropriate times and volumes. Total cost estimates have grown over the plan's life and now run into the tens of billions of dollars, with the effort frequently described as among the most ambitious ecosystem restoration projects ever undertaken.

Cost is shared between the federal government and the State of Florida, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District as the principal implementing agencies. That partnership structure has been both the plan's enabling mechanism and a recurring source of delay, since projects require authorization and appropriation from both partners.

A memorandum of understanding reached in 2025 allows Florida to take a leading role in executing federally funded components, an arrangement the state has credited for accelerating the EAA Reservoir timeline. Shifting execution to the state partner can shorten schedules where federal contracting timelines have been the constraint.

The EAA Reservoir

The Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir is among the most consequential individual components of the plan. It is designed to capture water from Lake Okeechobee that would otherwise be discharged east through the St. Lucie Canal and west through the Caloosahatchee River, store it, and route it through a stormwater treatment area before sending it south into the Everglades.

The eastern and western discharges have been the source of recurring environmental crises in the Treasure Coast and Southwest Florida estuaries. Large freshwater releases carrying nutrients have contributed to algae blooms that have closed beaches, damaged marine life and affected tourism-dependent economies in those regions.

Storing that water rather than discharging it addresses both problems simultaneously, reducing damaging estuary releases while increasing the freshwater delivery the Everglades and Florida Bay require. That dual benefit is why the project has drawn support across constituencies that disagree on other water management questions.

Florida Bay and the salinity milestone

The report that Florida Bay reached salinity targets for the first time in decades is a meaningful indicator because the bay sits at the downstream end of the entire system. It receives whatever freshwater the Everglades delivers, and its condition therefore integrates the performance of everything upstream.

Insufficient freshwater delivery makes the bay hypersaline, meaning saltier than seawater, a condition that has repeatedly killed seagrass beds across large areas. Those die-offs cascade through the ecosystem, since seagrass provides habitat and nursery grounds for the fish and invertebrates that support both the food web and the recreational fishery.

Seagrass die-offs in Florida Bay in the late 1980s and again in 2015 caused extensive ecological damage and prompted substantial concern about the bay's trajectory. Salinity conditions reaching target levels indicates that restored flows are reaching the system's terminus, though ecological recovery generally lags improvement in physical conditions.

Water quality and the nutrient problem

Beyond quantity and timing, water quality has been a central challenge. Phosphorus loading from agricultural and urban runoff altered the Everglades ecosystem by favoring cattails over the sawgrass and periphyton communities adapted to the naturally nutrient-poor conditions of the historic system.

Florida constructed stormwater treatment areas covering tens of thousands of acres to address that problem. These engineered wetlands use plant uptake and sedimentation to remove phosphorus before water enters the protected Everglades, and they have achieved substantial reductions in nutrient concentrations.

Litigation over water quality standards spanned decades, with federal courts supervising Florida's compliance with limits established under consent decrees. The treatment area construction program emerged substantially from that litigation, illustrating how legal enforcement has shaped the restoration alongside the planning process.

The scientific review process

The biennial reviews conducted by the National Academies provide independent assessment of restoration progress, and they have consistently served as a candid accounting rather than a promotional exercise. Prior reviews have identified delays, funding shortfalls, sequencing problems and concerns that individual projects were proceeding without adequate attention to system-wide outcomes.

The reviews also address scientific questions including whether monitoring is adequate to detect ecological responses, whether adaptive management is functioning as intended, and how climate change and sea level rise should be incorporated into project design.

Sea level rise is a particularly consequential consideration for a system whose southern boundary is at sea level. Saltwater intrusion into coastal aquifers and the landward migration of mangroves into freshwater marsh are already documented, and restoration designs increasingly account for conditions that will differ from those the original plan assumed.

What restoration means for South Florida residents

The Everglades system supplies drinking water for a substantial share of South Florida's population through the Biscayne Aquifer, which is recharged by surface water in the greater Everglades system. Maintaining freshwater head in that system is what holds back saltwater intrusion into coastal wellfields.

Flood protection is the other direct benefit. The water management infrastructure that damaged the ecosystem also protects millions of residents from flooding, and restoration projects must deliver ecological improvement without compromising that function. That constraint shapes project design throughout the plan.

Economic effects extend to tourism, commercial and recreational fishing and the property values associated with water quality in coastal communities. Algae blooms in the estuaries have produced documented economic losses in affected areas, which is part of the case advanced for accelerating storage projects.

Funding and the political dimension

Everglades restoration has enjoyed unusually durable bipartisan support in both Tallahassee and Washington, an alignment sustained by the breadth of interests it serves. Environmental organizations, agricultural interests, coastal communities, municipal water suppliers and the tourism industry each have stakes in the outcome.

State funding has been appropriated at elevated levels in recent budget cycles, and federal appropriations have supported Corps of Engineers construction. The pace of work remains sensitive to annual appropriations decisions in both capitals, which introduces year-to-year uncertainty into multi-year construction schedules.

Disagreements persist over specific questions including land acquisition, agricultural water quality requirements and the sequencing of projects. Those disputes are generally about method and priority rather than about whether restoration should proceed.

Wildlife and the measure of success

Ecologists generally regard wading bird nesting as the clearest single indicator of Everglades health, because these species integrate conditions across the system. Wood storks, white ibis, roseate spoonbills and various heron and egret species depend on the seasonal drying that concentrates prey fish into shrinking pools, a process that requires water levels to recede on the historic schedule.

When water management delivers the wrong depths at the wrong times, nesting fails even if total water volume is adequate. Monitoring programs count nests annually across the system, and those counts have fluctuated substantially, with occasional exceptional years demonstrating that the ecosystem retains the capacity to respond when hydrologic conditions align.

Other species carry their own indicator value. The Everglades snail kite depends on apple snails whose populations respond to water depth patterns, and the Cape Sable seaside sparrow nests on ground that must stay dry during breeding season, a requirement that has repeatedly constrained water management decisions. The American crocodile, by contrast, has recovered substantially and its status is frequently cited as a restoration success.

Invasive species and the limits of hydrology

Restoring water flow addresses the central injury to the Everglades but does not resolve every threat the ecosystem faces. Burmese pythons established a breeding population in South Florida and have been associated with dramatic declines in mammal populations across portions of Everglades National Park, a problem that improved hydrology does nothing to correct.

The state and federal agencies have pursued removal programs including contracted hunters and public challenges, and research continues into detection methods and potential biological controls. Those efforts have removed substantial numbers of animals without demonstrably reversing the population's establishment across the landscape.

Invasive plants present a parallel challenge. Melaleuca, Brazilian pepper, Old World climbing fern and other species alter habitat structure in ways that persist regardless of water management, and control requires sustained mechanical, chemical and biological intervention. Restoration budgets therefore fund an ongoing maintenance obligation alongside the capital construction that receives most public attention.

What's next

The National Academies review concludes this month, and its findings will provide an independent assessment of progress and identify areas requiring attention. Prior reviews have influenced subsequent planning and funding decisions.

Construction on the EAA Reservoir and associated stormwater treatment area continues, with the project representing a multi-year effort even with contracts executed. Other components of the restoration plan proceed on their own schedules across the system.

The Florida Press will continue covering Everglades restoration, including project milestones, water quality monitoring, conditions in Lake Okeechobee and the coastal estuaries, and the scientific assessments that measure progress.