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…