New life thrives in Myakka’s habitat restoration zone

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 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 slow 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, the park established a habitat restoration exclusion zone, clearly defining the areas as off limits to park visitors. This helped reduce continuous trampling by park visitors, which suppresses natural revegetation 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 groundcover coming into its own, wildlife continued to 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 first time.

Like all plovers, killdeer nest on the ground. 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.

Friends of Myakka River exists to support Myakka River State Park and the Wild and Scenic Myakka River. Together, we're protecting and sharing Myakka's Magic, to the benefit of future generations, and our own. Follow us @FriendsofMyakkaRiver