Restoring the Flow: A Milestone in the Revival of the Everglades

Yale Environment 360, May 14, 2026

The campaign to restore the Everglades has received a boost with completion of a key project that returns the flow of water to 55,000 acres that had once been drained for development. Experts see it as a major step forward in bringing back South Florida’s River of Grass.

Patterson Boulevard looks like a road to nowhere. In fact, it’s hardly a road at all, just two dirt tracks into the Florida swampland, hemmed in by willow thickets, pine flatwoods, and cypress forests, passable only in the dry season, and then just barely. 

Patterson is part of what’s left of an immense grid of roads built years ago for a failed development that was both massively ambitious and ecologically ruinous. Yet these tracks have now become an entryway into one of the more striking restoration projects in South Florida, a bright spot in nearly three decades of efforts to protect and revive what remains of the greater Everglades ecosystem.

Here, in Picayune Strand State Forest, the state and federal governments have been working for more than two decades to undo the damage wrought by that failed development. It’s been a huge undertaking across 55,000 acres. Recently, though, the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put the finishing touches on the most critical part of the work: restoring the natural flow of water across the land. How well this hydrological restoration leads to wider ecological recovery remains to be seen. But the transformation is already underway. ... [Cont'd] Picayune was one of eight projects given early priority and is one of first to be finished. It stands out for its scale and ambition — returning a vast semi-developed and highly degraded wetland to something close to its natural state.

“I kind of view Picayune Strand as a microcosm of the entire [Everglades] plan,” said Stephen Davis, chief science officer at the Everglades Foundation, a conservation group.  Read the full Yale Environment 360 article here: https://e360.yale.edu/features/picayune-strand-restoration-project

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