The Everglades Nutrient Removal Project (ENRP) was a demonstration-scale wetland project proposed by the

Everglades Forever Act The Everglades Forever Act is a Florida law passed in 1994 designed to restore the Everglades. The law recognized, the “Everglades ecological system is endangered as a result of adverse changes in water quality, and in the quantity, distribution ...

. Functioning as a prototype for the much larger scale Everglades Construction Project, the ENRP was designed to model the process of using

Stormwater treatment area Stormwater treatment areas (STAs) are constructed wetlands divided into flow-through treatment cells that remove nutrients from agricultural and urban runoff water. The nutrients are consumed through plant growth, and captured by accumulation of d ...

s (STAs) to remove nutrients, especially phosphorus, from agricultural runoff entering the

Everglades The Everglades is a natural region of tropical climate, tropical wetlands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida, comprising the southern half of a large drainage basin within the Neotropical realm. The system begins near Orland ...

Description

Changes in the biotic integrity of the Everglades ecosystem has been largely attributed to the introduction of nutrient-rich runoff from the

Everglades Agricultural Area The Everglades Agricultural Area Environmental Protection District (EAA EPD), better known as simply the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA), is an area extending south from Lake Okeechobee to the northern levee of Water Conservation Area 3A, from ...

. In 1994, The Everglades Forever Act authorized a 40,000-acre construction project (the Everglades Construction Program) that would use STAs as a way to clean water headed for

Everglades National Park Everglades National Park is an American national park that protects the southern twenty percent of the original Everglades in Florida. The park is the largest tropical wilderness in the United States and the largest wilderness of any kind east ...

of nutrients that would throw the fragile ecosystem out of balance. Never before had a project of that size been managed and so the ENRP was created as an opportunity to gain perspective in the construction and operation of wetlands for nutrient removal. It was designed using 3,815 acres of land as opposed to the 40,000+ acres proposed for the final project. Its primary goal was to reduce the levels of phosphorus entering Water Conservation Area 1 (WCA-1) and to offer critical data and insight into the design and operation of the much larger scale project to come.

Management

The

South Florida Water Management District The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) is a regional governmental district that oversees water resources from Orlando to the Florida Keys. The mission of the SFWMD is to manage and protect water resources by balancing and improving w ...

(SFWMD) conducted construction, research and monitoring of the project. This required building structural elements like levees and pump stations and also establishing vegetation. Particular emergent plants such as cattails were employed for their ability to uptake phosphorus out of the water as a means of short term removal, as well as absorbing nutrients into dead plant matter and soil particles for long term removal. Information gained from the experiment allowed for SFWMD to both anticipate potential problems and ensure that optimized phosphorus retention results could be achieved by STA technology at a comparatively lower cost.

References

{{Reflist Biodiversity Everglades