Soil Characteristics of the Everglades Peatland

This chapter describes some of the chemical and physical characteristics of the Everglades peatlands including the distribution of organic C and nutrients (N, P), historical and recent rates of peat accretion, nutrient accumulation, and the effects of anthropogenic hydrologic alteration and nutrient enrichment on these processes. Excellent reviews of the origin and development of the Everglades peatland have been written by Gleason et al. (1984) and Gleason and Stone (1994). The effects of eutrophication, especially P, on Everglades plant community structure and ecosystem processes have been described extensively (Belanger et al. 1989; Davis 1989, 1991; Koch and Reddy 1992; Craft and Richardson 1993a, 1995; Reddy et al. 1993; Qualls and Richardson 1995; Miao and Sklar 1998; Vaithiyanathan and Richardson 1999; Chiang et al. 2000; Qualls and Richardson 2000). Likewise, review articles describing efforts to drain the Everglades and the ecological consequences of these efforts are described by Light and Dineen (1994) and in this book’s Chaps. 2 and 8. The reader is referred to these papers to gain an in-depth understanding of the geological development and the effects of human activities on the Everglades peatlands.