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Ecosystem restoration often aims to create environmental conditions that support communities of native organisms resembling those prior to alteration by humans. One focus of the multi-decade multi-billion-dollar Florida Everglades restoration effort is to recreate hydrologic conditions in Everglades National Park and associated pulses of aquatic animal prey to support the large colonies of seasonally nesting wading birds that are iconic predators in the ecosystem. Recent studies indicate that invasion of predatory Asian Swamp Eels (Monopterus albus/javanensis) has disrupted the hydrology-mediated production of crayfish and some small fishes in the drainage of first invasion (circa 2012). Here we used a complete community dataset of fish and decapods to report changes to the aquatic community diversity, composition, and biomass of prey produced for wading birds. After the establishment of swamp eels in Taylor Slough (Everglades National Park) average fish and decapod richness declined by 25% and communities shifted to a new state dominated by grass shrimp and a few species of small fishes. Swamp eels differentially reduced the production of primary wading bird resources; while there has been a 68% decline in total small fish and decapod biomass, the biomass of the most important prey species for nesting wading birds declined 80%. If similar impacts follow the spread of swamp eels into other major drainages of the Everglades, the invasion may precipitate an ecosystem collapse—fundamentally simplifying and restructuring the aquatic communities of this vast wetland ecosystem and limiting the trophic support for wading bird breeding aggregations that are important indicators for ecological restoration.
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Retrieve and summarize the Everglades Wading Bird Project data
The wader package provides functions to download and generate summaries for the count, nesting, indicator, and weather data from the Wading Bird Project. The Wading Bird Project is a long-term (and ongoing) monitoring site in the Everglades water conservation areas. The raw data files can be found at https://github.com/weecology/evergladeswadingbird.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2326954
- PAR ID:
- 10657600
- Publisher / Repository:
- Zenodo
- Date Published:
- Edition / Version:
- v0.0.2
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ecology time-series long-term
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Right(s):
- MIT
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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