SCIENCE/EARTH SCIENCES GATORBYTES The University of Florida has an ambitious goal: to harness the University Florida of power of its faculty, staff, students, and alumni to solve some of society’s most pressing problems and to become a resource for the state of Florida, the nation, and the world.

Sea levels are rising around the globe, and in Florida—with its 1,200 miles of coastline and mostly flat topography—this is of particular concern. The state depends on coastal cities, where 75 percent of the population lives and where more than four-fifths of its economic activity takes place. When econ-

omists tally up the likely costs of rising seas, they rank Florida as the most WHEN THE SEAS RISE vulnerable state in the nation and Miami as one of the most vulnerable major cities in the world. When the Seas Rise takes us on an alarming journey from the dying coastal forests, where salt-killed tree trunks stand like sentinels of a retreating army, to the high tide–flooded streets of cities from St. Augustine to Key West. Meet the scientists at the University of Florida—researchers in biology, geol- ogy, entomology, horticulture, urban and regional planning, as well as other fields—who, along with experts around the state, are planning for the sea change already upon us and the greater changes to come. They are working

around the clock to predict how global climate shifts will affect the state; to Gatorbytes protect drinking water and slow the effects of flooding; to develop new ways to farm; to save our butterflies, sea turtles, Key deer, and other endangered creatures; to preserve the state’s economy; and to help coastal dwellers plan future havens for the people and wildlife of Florida.

The stories chronicled in Gatorbytes span all colleges WHEN THE and units across the UF campus. They detail the far- reaching impact of UF’s research, technologies, and innovations—and the UF faculty members dedicated to them. Gatorbytes describe how UF is continuing to build on its strengths and extend the reach of its efforts so SEAS RISE that it can help even more people in even more places.

GLOBAL CHANGES AND LOCAL IMPACTS

IBSN 978-1-942852-17-9 $14.95

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WHEN THE SEAS RISE

GLOBAL CHANGES AND LOCAL IMPACTS

Heather Dewar

CONTENTS

1. Nature’s Billboards 1

2. Obey and the Rock 11

Field Notes: On the Beach 32

3. Come Rain or Come Shine 37

Lab Notes: Hurricane Lore 47

4. Intelligent Tinkering 49

5. The Way Forward 71

Field Notes: Of Islands and Ice 85

Acknowledgments 91

Notes 93

1

NATURE’S BILLBOARDS

A Tampa Bay surgeon was among the first Floridians to notice a sign that climate change is already making its mark on the state, though the doctor did not grasp the significance of the portent in his own backyard. Jack Putz, a University of Florida biology professor and an expert on tropical forests, took the doctor’s phone call in his Gainesville office in autumn 1991. The caller had a weekend home on a wild and beautiful marsh outside Yankeetown, near where the Withlacoochee River empties its fresh water into the Gulf of Mexico on Florida’s Big Bend. The house overlooks a nameless creek that meanders past forested islands of pines, oaks, cedars, and cabbage palms. “He said the palm trees were dying,” recalled Putz. “I joined forces with a forestry professor and a plant pathologist and paid the doctor a visit.” The three scientists expected to make a quick identification of the disease attacking the palms. Driving west from Gaines- ville, they took Highway 121 across the Williston sandhills, rel- ict dunes piled up before the last ice age when the world was warmer and sea levels were higher than today. On State Road 19, they cut across a platform of limestone rock that stretches to the Gulf, then followed State Road 40 to Yankeetown.

· 1 · 2 · When the Seas Rise

This swath of mostly protected land, held in state and fed- eral wildlife refuges and nature preserves, is about as close to wilderness as you will find along the Florida coast. Only a few hunting camps interrupt the flow of marshes and forests, creeks and bays, Gulf waters and wide skies luminous with sea- reflected light. Bald eagles outnumber people here. At last count, 13 pairs were nesting in the coastal forests around Yankeetown. Timbering flourished here in the mid-1800s, when loggers began cutting red cedar trees to make pencils and fragrant pan- eling for cedar closets. Others harvested palms to be made into brooms and brushes. But those industries died out about 100 years ago, and few people other than hunters and fishermen come here anymore. This is biologically rich country, home to at least 576 kinds of plants, including 16 species found nowhere in the world other than Florida and its borderlands. On this low terrain a few inches’ change in elevation cues a transition from marsh to palm- and cedar-girdled flats, and then to forests: red maple, ash, elm, live oak, and sweet gum, with a few cypress and sweet bay magnolias. Native slash pines mark the highest ground. The scientists spotted these subtle changes as they took a side road to the doctor’s place. “We looked around and saw that, yes, there were palm trees dying. But there were also dead and dying cedar trees. There were oak trees dying. There were pine trees dying,” Putz said. “We realized that because of the diversity of species affected, it probably wasn’t a pathogen. And it wasn’t just on that one property but on other forested islands as well.” Anxious to learn the extent of the die-off, the three scientists arranged a flight in a Florida Division of Forestry helicopter. “On a beautiful autumn morning we flew from just north of Tampa’s development all the way around the Big Bend to south of Tallahassee,” Putz recalled. Nature’s Billboards · 3

“The extent of forest loss along that coast was alarming. For mile after mile, you could see the bones of these dead trees and, in some places, salt marsh plants underneath them. The pattern of tree death varied, but the phenomenon was visible through- out the flight.” The swath of dead and dying trees was more than 60 miles long. “At first we thought it was storm-related,” Putz said. “What struck us was that the deaths were concentrated close to the coast. But what later emerged from our studies is that it is el- evation above sea level, rather than proximity to the coast, that determines how long trees survive.” Putz and his colleagues had discovered one early warning sign of human-made climate change. As people burn fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, changes in the composition of Earth’s atmosphere are causing it to trap more heat. Warmer air leads to warmer seas. Since water ex- pands as it heats up, and since the planet’s glaciers and polar ice caps are shedding meltwater, the oceans’ water volume is increasing. Sea levels are rising along most of the world’s coastlines. In part it’s a natural phenomenon, brought about by irregularities in Earth’s orbit around the Sun that lead to predictable, millen- nia-long cycles of warming and cooling. Earth is still respond- ing to the end of the last ice age some 17,000 years ago. But this change has been speeding up throughout the indus- trial age, and seas are rising faster now than they have in re- corded history. As saltwater climbs up Florida’s shorelines, it brings a suite of changes—among them, the deaths of trees that can’t abide brackish water. In 1990, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report predicted global warming would lead to a forest die-off along the Big Bend. A few years later that forecast was coming true. 4 · When the Seas Rise

In spring 1992, the University of Florida researchers marked out 13 forest plots, mostly on islands in Waccasassa State Pre- serve a few miles north of Yankeetown. Once a week for five years, slogging through mud, bugs, storms, and spiky marsh grasses, they checked for flooding and tested groundwater for traces of salt borne on high tides from Waccasassa Bay. Brackish water turned up in nearly all their samples—as little as a tea- spoon per liter in plots that rarely flooded, but more than four teaspoons per liter, enough for a medicinal gargle, where floods came often. Once a year they measured every tree in every plot, record- ing its species, age, and whether seedlings grew at its feet. They cross-checked their work against Nature’s indicators: cattails, sawgrass, and white-flowering arrowhead growing where the water was fresh or nearly fresh; black needlerush, salt grass, and saltworts in brackish water. To find out what had happened in the decades before the study began, they turned to tide measurements taken since 1939 at nearby Cedar Key and concluded that tidal flooding had become more frequent. Before the 1950s even the lowest lying plots rarely flooded. But by the 1990s they were flooding as many as 26 times a year. The more often the tree islands flooded, the saltier the soil water got and the quicker the forests died. First to go were the salt-sensitive ash, elms, and maples. Live oaks and slash pines were next. Red cedars and cabbage palms held on the longest, but with increased soil salinity, they died as well. The scientists set up kiddie pools behind their campus labo- ratory, filled each pool with tree seedlings in plastic pots, and added water containing measured amounts of salt. The experi- ment confirmed what they saw in the forest. The most sensi- tive species could tolerate only two parts salt to every thousand parts of water, a dilution about ¹/₁₆ the strength of seawater. Nature’s Billboards · 5

Cabbage palms and cedars endured until their roots were in water about one-quarter as salty as the sea. In the field, they found that decades earlier, salt stress had robbed the trees of their capacity to reproduce. On some tree islands the youngest cabbage palms were 80 years old and had not produced seedlings since the 1940s. “These stands are effectively dead already,” the researchers wrote. A 2005 follow-up study showed the forests were declining even faster than expected as a drought compounded the effect of rising seas. A companion study showed that between 1973 and 2003, more than one-sixth of Waccasassa Preserve’s forests died, replaced by salt marsh. Researchers have used a computer model called SLAMM— the acronym stands for “Sea Level Rise Affecting Marshes Model”—to forecast the fate of Waccasassa Bay wetlands. If seas rise 2 feet by 2100, the model predicted, more than two-thirds of the forest and about one-fourth of the freshwater marshes will be gone. The Big Bend’s coastal forests are rapidly retreating from ris- ing seas. In less than 400 years they may disappear. “I hate billboards, but I would like to put up a billboard showing people what sea level rise is doing to these forests,” Putz said. It’s difficult for a forest ecologist to contemplate the death of a forest without a sense of loss. Still, he noted, the salt marshes that are replacing the trees are nurseries for young fish and crabs. They are feeding grounds for wading birds like roseate spoonbills. And since the Big Bend is sparsely populated and has plentiful conservation lands, these forests have room to move inland. That may not be true elsewhere. Salt-killed tree trunks now stand like sentinels cut off from 6 · When the Seas Rise a retreating army along many coastal roads. One place to see them is south of St. Augustine along A1A, on barrier islands often less than a mile wide. Another is in Miami-Dade County on the mainland’s tip, just before U.S. 1 makes the leap onto Key Largo. Dying coastal forests are one obvious sign that Florida is fac- ing an altered future as the consequences of human-made cli- mate change play out. But there are plenty of others. In 2013 news outlets worldwide ran startling photos of pe- destrians wading and kayakers paddling along the streets of Miami Beach beneath cloudless October skies. The problem wasn’t rainwater but seawater burbling up from the storm sew- ers on the annual “king tide”—the highest tide of the year fol- lowing the autumn equinox. With rising seas, the city’s flood protection system has become the source of the problem it was built to prevent. To turn back the tide, the city spent $100 million to install 20 new storm water pumps, yet in September and October 2015 the streets flooded again. Miami Beach City engineer Bruce Mowry plans to install another 80 pumps. “Sunny-day floods” are the new normal along low-lying stretches of the Atlantic Coast from St. Augustine to the Keys. Key West’s international airport now has seawater on the taxi- way at every full moon high tide. Seawater is seeping into municipal water wells from West Palm Beach to Homestead, forcing cities to dig new wells far inland. After saltwater seeped into the groundwater underlying more than four-fifths of Hallandale Beach, the Broward County city of 39,0000 shut down six of its eight municipal wells and began planning new well fields further west, at an estimated cost of $46 million over 20 to 30 years. The coastal bays that once were a blend of freshwater and Nature’s Billboards · 7 saltwater, providing ideal conditions for young fish and shell- fish, are becoming saltier as the sea advances, said Florida Sea Grant director Karl Havens. Many tasty and commercially valu- able species may be unable to adapt to the change. A study by former University of Florida researcher Jennifer Seavey and four colleagues found two-thirds of the oyster reefs between Crystal River and Apalachee Bay were lost between 1982 and 2011, with the greatest losses farthest from shore. Young oysters cannot survive in full-strength seawater, which also harms adults. The researchers hypothesize that as the shell- fish die, storms break up the reefs they have built over many generations, which provide habitat for a variety of fish as well as storm protection for people living along the coast. And a new tropical wave is moving up the peninsula. In 2013 scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Brown University, and the University of Maryland identified what they believe is the northernmost wild mangrove tree in North America: a black mangrove sapling on the shore at Ponte Vedra Beach, between St. Augustine and Jacksonville. A generation ago these tropical trees, which are freeze-killed when the thermometer drops below 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit, were rarely seen north of Cocoa Beach. But lead researcher Kyle Cavanaugh, a remote sensing expert, examined photos taken by a NASA satellite between 1984 and 2011. In that short time, the photos showed mangroves had taken over more than 3,000 acres of shoreline north of Palm Beach County, spreading into former salt marshes. The mangroves are marching north because of a small but significant decline in the number of killing frosts in North and Central Florida. Between the study’s first five years and its last five, Daytona Beach recorded 1.4 fewer days per year when temperatures fell below the killing point of 28.4 degrees. 8 · When the Seas Rise

The researchers had shown one way that climate change is altering the environment—not by hiking up average tempera- tures but by changing the frequency of extreme weather. “I think this idea of tipping points in the earth’s ecosystem is absolutely critical,” Cavanaugh told the New York Times. “The changes in temperature can be pretty small, but once you cross a threshold, you can get rather dramatic changes.” Cavanaugh predicts that over the next 50 years, black man- groves will move another 100 miles up the coast and cross the Florida-Georgia line. Putz is seeing mangroves in Yankeetown, too. Other re- searchers are finding mangrove patches in Texas and Louisi- ana. This may be a good thing for mangroves—which are being mown down throughout the tropics—and for people. Of all the world’s trees, only mangroves are tough enough to grow in seawater, says Putz. Swimming among their prop roots is an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet—shrimp, stone crabs, and blue crabs; snapper, grouper, and grunt—along with an- glers’ favorites like red drum, sea trout, and tarpon. Expanding mangrove forests may turn out to be a boon for Florida’s com- mercial and recreational fisheries. And they are prodigious land builders, trapping and holding sediment in their networks of roots, and even slowing the ebb and flow of tides. Mangrove forests are bulwarks against storm surges. In an era of rising seas, they could be powerful natural allies in human efforts to protect the coast. Mangroves may even help us remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas contributing to global warming, from the atmosphere. In a study conducted in and around the Kennedy Space Center where mangroves and salt marsh plants inter- mingle, Villanova University doctoral student Cheryl Doughty compared the amounts of carbon stored in the two ecosystems. Like all green plants, mangroves and salt marsh grasses extract Nature’s Billboards · 9 carbon dioxide from the air, release the oxygen back into the atmosphere, and store the carbon in roots, leaves, stems, and trunks. They also trap fallen leaves and hold them as they de- cay, forming a carbon-rich soil that can stay in place for centu- ries if the plants are undisturbed. The mangroves Doughty studied stored twice as much car- bon as the common salt marsh plants. She estimates that if Flori- da’s mangroves expand as much as Cavanaugh and others have forecast, by 2080 they could store more than 28 trillion tons of carbon, equal to nearly half the amount of carbon that Florid- ians are emitting into the atmosphere each year. There’s no guarantee that the transition from salt marsh to mangrove will be a lasting one. If sea levels rise very fast, studies have shown, the mangroves can’t keep pace and are replaced by open water. Still, it’s a reminder that like any crisis, climate change may bring opportunities as well as danger. Florida scientists are pointing out the changes already taking place and predicting changes to come: rising seas that threaten beaches, islands, and coastal cities; rising temperatures that could cut farms’ productivity and alter the year-round sun- kissed way of life so many Floridians cherish; uncertainty about the stability of the rainy season, the source of the state’s water supply; and the risk of extinction for plants and animals found nowhere else on earth. They are also working to develop new crop varieties that can cope with extremes of temperature and moisture; saving the most critically endangered of our unique plants and animals; and helping coast-dwellers plan for a future that includes safe havens for people and wildlife. “We know that Florida is in the crosshairs,” said James W. Jones, a University of Florida Distinguished Professor Emeritus of agricultural and biological engineering. “There are a lot of 10 · When the Seas Rise threats, and I don’t mean to minimize that at all. But we have a lot of scientific capability here.” Jones cofounded and directs the Florida Climate Institute, a center where university and government researchers work to- gether to understand how global changes will affect the state. “Climate change, sea level rise, and extreme events are going to play havoc with our state,” Jones said, “yet in some instances it may create opportunities that we need to be prepared to take advantage of.” 2

OBEY AND THE ROCK

If you live in the big diamond-shaped chunk of Florida between Kissimmee and Key West, Fort Myers and Fort Pierce, a por- tion of your comfort and security rests in the hands of Jayantha Obeysekera and a crew of more than 60 engineers, hydrologists, geologists, biologists, and computer experts. Obeysekera grew up in Sri Lanka, hopscotched across two continents to get a doctorate in civil engineering, and became chief modeler for the South Florida Water Management District, which oversees water supplies for nearly eight million people living in Southeast Florida and more than three times as many visitors each year. “Call me Obey,” he told me. “Everybody in South Florida does.” (He pronounces it Obi, like Obi Wan Kenobi of Star Wars fame.) The District also controls flooding in a 16-county region that includes some of the most valuable real estate on the Eastern Seaboard, jutting into the ocean on the leading edge of hurri- cane country. It stores water for farms that provide northerners with winter tomatoes, lettuce, and beans. Its water sustains an astonishing array of wildlife on more than 2.5 million acres of conservation land, including two national parks. Lacking North Florida’s abundant rivers and springs, this most populated part of the state relies on rainfall stored un-

· 11 · 12 · When the Seas Rise derground in layers of porous limestone rock. South of Lake Okeechobee the land resembles a limestone bowl with a bro- ken rim. A coastal ridge, interrupted here and there by swampy sloughs, holds freshwater marshes that absorb rainwater like a sponge, allowing it to seep into the underground Biscayne Aquifer. At more than 1 million acres, the Everglades is the largest freshwater marsh in the United States, but it has been drained for agriculture and development and now is about half of its original size. The River of Grass has been replaced by a $16 billion flood control network stretching from Orlando to the Keys, made up of 2,100 miles of canals and levees, 600 dams and weirs, and 70 pump stations, some holding several pumps the size of tractor- trailer trucks. The system is designed to hold water in times of drought, get rid of it in times of flooding by funneling it into estuaries to the east, south, and west, and keep the ocean out. From a control room in West Palm Beach, engineers run the pumps, weirs, and floodgates and monitor the movement of water through the system, striving to balance the competing demands of cities, industries, farms, and wildlife. Obeysekera and the Hydrologic and Environmental Systems Modeling Group guide these operations and serve as the Dis- trict’s resident futurists. They run the prosaically named South Florida Water Management Model, a set of computer algo- rithms that simulate the behavior of water as it moves over and under 7,600 square miles of marshes, farm fields, forest patches, quarries, suburbs, downtowns, and bays. The model captures natural forces like evapotranspiration—the movement of wa- ter into the atmosphere as it evaporates from the land and is exhaled by photosynthesizing plants; human-made structures; and social factors like the water use restrictions the District sometimes imposes in times of drought. Obeysekera and his group are now working on a new set Obey and the Rock · 13 of variables—the changing conditions imposed by climate change. Here’s a typical problem: If seas rise another 6 inches, 20 or more of the Water Management District’s flood control structures, protecting coastal areas from Boca Raton to Florida City, would probably fail. Some could fail much sooner. Gravity-fed canals control flooding across the region. As long as canal water levels are lower than the land surface, rainwater runs off into them and flows out to sea. But when canal levels are lower than the coastal waters that receive the freshwater flow, seawater invades the canals and seeps inland through their porous banks. The salty water is a serious threat. It can taint cities’ water wells, making them unusable, and kill plants and animals in the freshwater marshes. In the 1960s the District equipped the canals with steel gates that can be closed from the West Palm Beach control room to keep saltwater out or opened during floods, releasing a pulse of freshwater that pushes salt- water downstream. “We have many structures built fifty years ago with room for 6 inches of sea level rise, but that 6 inches is already gone,” Obeysekera said. When rainwater threatens to overflow the ca- nals, “typically we open the gates, we let water out, and every- thing works well. But there are times we cannot open the gates even now.” These are the main issues Obeysekera worries about, as he listed them in a technical paper and a speech to fellow Florida climate scientists:

Will hotter temperatures and changing weather patterns affect Florida’s rainfall, resulting in more droughts or floods? How quickly will rising seas cause saltwater intrusion into coastal well fields, making much of the water sup- ply unfit to drink? 14 · When the Seas Rise

How soon will rising seas overwhelm the canals’ capacity to control flooding? And since flooding already occurs when hurricanes and winter nor’easters send storm surges up the canals, how frequently will these storm surges happen? How soon will seawater begin to inundate what he refers to, in the detached language that scientific publications require, as “real estate and ecosystems”? Meaning, the places where today’s parents expect their children and grandchildren to live, work, and raise their families; and the bays, marshes, and coastal forests that should continue to provide them with fresh seafood and flood protection?

Notice that three out of his four top concerns center on rising seas. “Of all the ongoing and expected changes from global warm- ing,” wrote coastal geologist Orren Pilkey in 2009, “the increase in the volume of the oceans and accompanying rise in the level of the sea will be the most immediate, the most certain, the most widespread, and the most economically visible in its effects.” This is crucial for Florida, with its 1,200 miles of coastline, its mostly flat topography, and its dependence on coastal cities where 75 percent of the population lives and more than four- fifths of the economic activity takes place. When economists tally up the likely costs of rising seas, they rank Florida as the most vulnerable state in the nation and Mi- ami as one of the most vulnerable major cities in the world. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development looked at the risk of damage to infrastructure— not just businesses and homes but ports, roads, rails, and ser- vices like water supply, sewage treatment, and energy produc- tion—in 136 of the world’s largest cities. Miami topped the list, Obey and the Rock · 15 with potential flood damages of $416 billion if a tropical storm should strike today. Notice also that when Obeysekera lists his critical concerns, he does not ask whether seas will rise, but when. This is because the process has begun. Tidal records show that the seas are ris- ing nearly twice as fast as they did just 25 years ago. In an interesting twist, studies show Florida and the South- east are not consistently hotter than they used to be. So far, scientists say, the world’s terrestrial warming trend is concen- trated in colder parts of the globe. But that is not true of the oceans. And the seas that have shaped Florida’s way of life since humans first settled on the coast more than 8,000 years ago are changing in ways that will force Floridians to change with them.

* * *

The world’s average land and sea temperatures have increased by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, according to the lat- est comprehensive review of the evidence by the world’s most authoritative group of climate experts, the United Nations– sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. As most of us learned in elementary school, land absorbs heat more quickly than water, and releases it quickly, too. The oceans have slowly absorbed the atmosphere’s heat and held it. More than 90 percent of the global burden of increased heat is being stored in the world’s oceans, the IPCC reported in 2014. As we know, water expands as it heats up. This thermal expan- sion is the most obvious cause of sea level rise and the first one that researchers observed. Scientists now think the melting of the polar ice caps—a pro- cess well under way—will ultimately turn out to be the greatest contributor to sea level rise. 16 · When the Seas Rise

Thermal expansion and the melting of the polar ice caps can be slowed down and eventually stopped if humans get green- house gas emissions under control, said climate modeler Ben Kirtman, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Sci- ences. But there is no emergency brake for the climate system, and warming won’t stop as soon as atmospheric emissions do. “Because the oceans lag behind the land areas, they are a source of thermal inertia for the entire climate system,” said Kirtman. “The oceans are going to continue to expand and re- lease heat into the atmosphere for centuries to come. So we are already committed to a significant amount of sea level rise.” Kirtman, who served as lead author of a chapter in the IPCC’s 2014 report, uses global models of the atmosphere and ocean to predict weather and climate changes over days or de- cades. He has an office on Virginia Key, next to an inlet connect- ing Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Sunny-day flooding is commonplace in the island’s parking lots. “Climate change isn’t something way off in the future here,” Kirtman said. “It’s something we deal with every day.” Obeysekera agrees. “The question is not ‘Will sea level rise?’ It’s already rising,” he said. “The question is ‘How much, how soon, and what will the consequences be?”

* * * The rise and fall of oceans is a natural phenomenon far more ancient than Florida, the last part of the U.S. mainland to emerge from the sea. About 1.8 million years ago, the peninsula stretched no farther south than today’s suburban Jacksonville, with a sprinkling of islands south of that. Most of South Florida formed underwater, from corals growing about 150,000 years ago and limestones deposited in a shallow sea bed, when sea Obey and the Rock · 17 levels were higher than today. More recently, during the last ice age, seas were so much lower that the peninsula was about 300 miles wide. Today’s sea level rise is different than anything in Florida’s past. It comes after about 6,000 years when sea levels were sta- ble, rising on average a few hundredths of an inch per year. During that time civilizations anchored themselves to the coasts, building cities meant for permanence along the world’s shorelines. In 1938 an English amateur meteorologist put forward some of the first evidence that humans are warming the earth by burning carbon-rich coal, oil, and gas, increasing the propor- tion of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that trap the sun’s heat. Guy Stewart Callendar discovered a warming trend in temperature records from the mid-nineteenth century onward, deduced that carbon dioxide emissions were the cause, and found evidence to back his hypothesis. “By fuel combustion man has added about 150,000 million tons of carbon dioxide to the air during the past half century,” Callendar wrote in a paper published by the Royal Meteoro- logical Society. “Man is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate which must be very exceptional on the geological time scale. From the best laboratory observations it appears that the principal result . . . would be a gradual increase in the mean temperature of the colder regions of the Earth.” A graph superimposing the Englishman’s records on mod- ern reconstructions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century climate shows a close match and a clear upward trend. Callen- dar thought the warming trend would prevent “the return of the deadly glaciers,” but few scientists took him seriously and most science historians have forgotten him. By the 1980s the trend Callendar observed was more obvi- 18 · When the Seas Rise ous. Scientists and policy makers wondered whether the ef- fects of rising temperatures might be less benign than he had expected. In 1990 the IPCC, the UN’s panel of several hundred expert climate scientists, issued a report framed in the cautious terms typical of any new scientific field. The physics behind the the- ory of global warming were correct, the panel concluded. Data showed that the planet is warming, and climate models pre- dicted it would warm by as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the twenty-first century, but “many uncertainties” remained. The panel listed some issues scientists needed to address, in- cluding the influence of the oceans, clouds, and the polar ice sheets. The quarter-century-old statement about uncertainties still echoes in many public conversations about climate change. But since then, science has made advances that confirm the link between theory and reality. The National Oceanic and Atmo- spheric Administration (NOAA) operates satellites that mea- sure the height of the sea, the mass of glaciers and polar ice sheets, and temperature, humidity, cloud formation, and rain- fall worldwide. A network of sea buoys monitors ocean tem- peratures in real time. With advances in computing power and in our understanding of the forces that shape Earth’s climate, researchers are improving computer modeling. In the latest IPCC consensus report in 2014, the uncertainty of the 1980s was gone. The world’s top climate experts flatly stated, “Human influence has been detected in the warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, and in global mean sea level rise, and it is extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-nineteenth cen- tury.” To eliminate any confusion, the panelists defined “ex- tremely likely” as a probability of 95 to 100 percent. Obey and the Rock · 19

Meanwhile levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to climb. In 1850, where Callendar’s records began, the atmosphere’s portion of carbon dioxide was 285 parts per million parts of air. Carbon dioxide levels reached 300 parts per million in 1910, and 350 parts per million in 1990. In March 2015, the global monthly average for carbon diox- ide exceeded 400 parts per million, the highest levels known to occur on Earth in about 2 million years, NOAA reported. The IPCC has said that there is a chance humankind can limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Centigrade, or about 3½ degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of this century if greenhouse gases peak at no more than 450 parts per million. At a historic climate change conference in Paris in December 2015, 195 na- tions struck a voluntary agreement to strive for a temperature increase of less than 2 degrees Centigrade, although it’s unclear whether, and how, that goal can be met. If emissions continue to rise at today’s rate, average temperatures may soar 5 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. The IPCC has a U.S. counterpart, the National Climate As- sessment, which issues congressionally mandated reports every few years. Its latest summary of sea level rise came out in De- cember 2012; Obeysekera was one of the authors. It concluded the odds are 90 percent or better that seas will rise somewhere between 8 inches and 6½ feet by 2100. For South Florida, that is the difference between a nuisance and a catastrophe. At Florida International University, geo- graphic information systems expert Peter Harlem conducted a sea level rise mapping experiment for Miami-Dade County in 2008. Like all such experiments, Harlem’s maps are approxima- tions. They show that the first foot of sea level rise would cost the county most of its coastal marshes and mangrove forests— important barriers against storm surge flooding and essential 20 · When the Seas Rise nurseries for valuable fish and shellfish—and increase the amount of sunny-day flooding. At 3 feet, Harlem’s maps show extensive flooding in Little Havana, along the Miami River, and near Miami International Airport. At that point Harlem estimates about one-third of the county’s land area would be submerged. At 6 feet, Harlem’s maps show the southern Everglades would become a shallow bay, Miami Beach a narrow ribbon, and Miami a broad group of islands behind the high ground of the coastal ridge. In this projection, the Miami River has become a saltwater inlet connecting the Everglades estuary to the sea, and only 44 percent of the land surface remains above water. An online, interactive sea level rise app produced by NOAA shows similar results.

* * * The oldest and simplest way to track sea level rise over time is through tidal records. Since the nineteenth century, meteorolo- gists have recorded daily tide gauge measurements. Florida’s oldest tide gauge record, in Key West, stretches back to 1880 and has been used as a benchmark in dozens of studies track- ing Atlantic coast sea level rise. To calculate the rate of sea level change worldwide, scientists collect as many tidal measure- ments as possible, match up the data for each day’s high and low tides from place to place, and average them. They use those daily averages to construct a timeline. These records show worldwide sea levels have risen an aver- age of 8 inches since the start of the twentieth century—more than at any time since modern cultures began tracking tides. And in the mid-1990s the rate of sea level rise nearly doubled, from about one-fifteenth of an inch a year to one-eighth of an inch a year. Obey and the Rock · 21

Today altimeters aboard U.S. and European satellites supple- ment tide gauge information. The instruments emit as many as 1,000 radar or laser pulses per second, then record the time it takes for the pulses to travel to the sea surface and back. These readings can measure the ocean’s height with a margin of error of about 1 inch. In 2011 the Florida Climate Institute, a consortium of Flor- ida scientists studying climate change, commissioned Gary T. Mitch​um, a professor of physical oceanography at the Univer- sity of South Florida, to write a white paper assessing probable rates of sea level rise in the southeastern United States. Mitchum plotted readings from five different satellites taken between 1992 and 2010. He overlaid the satellite data on top of the much longer worldwide tide gauge records. The match was nearly perfect and serves as independent confirmation of the tide gauge’s track, about ⅛ of an inch per year of sea level rise. This rate “is indeed higher than anything we have seen in the historical record,” Mitchum wrote. Mitchum looked at ten recent years’ worth of information from tide gauges between Pensacola and Wilmington, and found the rate of rising seas along these shores was about 20 percent higher than the global average rate. Though ten years is too short a time span to draw conclusions, Mitchum suggested that for now it would be “sensible” to expect sea levels to rise about 20 percent more than the global average along the south- eastern coasts. But Mitchum and many other researchers warn that seas will eventually rise faster than today’s rate. Over the past decade it has become clear that the greatest contribution to sea level rise will likely come from the melting of the Greenland and Antarc- tic ice caps. Studies show the ice caps are melting faster than expected. 22 · When the Seas Rise

And for Florida’s Atlantic Coast there’s another concern: the fate of the Gulf Stream. The IPCC predicts the mighty current of warm seawater will eventually slow down. The Gulf Stream is the warm surface portion of a great cir- cular Atlantic Ocean flow. When the current’s warm, salty wa- ters reach the North Atlantic and turn cold, they sink and flow southward in the ocean’s depths, to surface in the southern ocean and repeat the circle. But if the Gulf Stream’s dense salt- water is diluted by lighter freshwater from melting ice, it will be less likely to sink. That could cause the circular current to turn more slowly. A study published in March 2015 in Nature Climate Change reconstructs sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic and concludes that the Gulf Stream has slowed down 15 to 20 per- cent since the 1970s, more than at any time in the last 900 years. But whether it’s a short-lived phenomenon or a lasting change is unclear. The study’s widely respected lead author, Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wrote in a blog post on RealClimate.org that the consequences of the Gulf Stream slowing down “would look nothing like the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow,” a wildly exaggerated 2004 disas- ter movie. But the slowdown “would not be harmless either,” Rahmstorf wrote, “for sea level, particularly along the U.S. east coast [and for] marine ecosystems.” “The southeastern U.S. is critically affected by the Gulf Stream,” said Kirtman. “If the Gulf Stream weakens, you’ll see higher rates of sea level rise, but the current models don’t do a very good job of [simulating] this. And our current thinking is that the Gulf Stream will weaken. We just don’t know when or by how much.” Even the best global climate models are a work in progress, said Kirtman. And their projections are global averages. Will Obey and the Rock · 23 they hold true for Florida? Can governments and businesses rely on them to make investments that will last for 30 years or more? * * *

Wrestling with questions like these, in 2011 the Florida Climate Institute organized a summit on the state’s climate issues that drew 175 academic researchers and government officials to Gainesville. The Florida Climate Institute is the brainchild of James Jones, University of Florida Distinguished Professor Emeritus of agricultural and biological engineering, and Eric Chassignet, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University and di- rector of that university’s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Pre- diction Studies. The institute, headquartered on the Gainesville campus and directed by Jones, brings together scientists from more than a dozen disciplines and nine Florida universities to collaborate on research and advise local governments about how to prepare for a changing climate. In 2011, supported by a $400,000 state grant, the institute produced a series of white papers summarizing the state of climate change science for Florida. Though many of the white papers’ numerical projec- tions have been overtaken by new data, these reports are the most comprehensive and most recent statewide assessments. In one of those papers, Obeysekera and climate modeler Vasubandhu Misra, an associate professor of meteorology at Florida State University, spelled out the factors that make the state’s fate in a warming world a scientific conundrum. Models that project the worldwide effects of climate change don’t work well for Florida, because they are designed to simu- late factors like snowmelt that don’t apply. And global models break Florida into a dozen pixels or fewer, blurring the distinc- tion between land and sea. Such a model can’t capture the ocean 24 · When the Seas Rise breezes that cool the coasts, the rainy season thunderstorms born of these moisture-laden winds, or the moderating effect of clouds that cloak the sun on so many summer afternoons. The models also don’t fully capture the effects of oceanic patterns like El Niño and La Niña, collectively known to at- mospheric scientists as ENSO. These variations in sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific affect weather patterns as far away as North America’s Atlantic coast. In El Niño years, when the Pacific waters are warm, winters in the southeastern United States tend to be warm and wet. The cool La Niña yields cooler, drier winters. Also crucial to Florida’s weather is the rhythmic warming and cooling of North Atlantic Ocean temperatures called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. With each phase of the cycle lasting anywhere from 25 to 40 years, this long-term pattern influences rainfall and the frequency and intensity of tropical storms and hurricanes. In a keynote speech to the Florida Climate Institute’s 2011 summit, Obeysekera talked about a water management district study analyzing Florida climate records. The group looked at daily high and low temperatures and rainfall records stretch- ing back to 1950 or earlier at 36 weather stations around the state, looking for patterns of change. Then they ran more than a dozen climate models backward through time, in a process known as “hindcasting,” to see whether the models’ simula- tions came close to matching the real-world Florida tempera- tures of the last few decades. The researchers didn’t find higher average temperatures statewide. That was no surprise, since the warming effects of higher levels of greenhouse gases are affecting land tempera- tures primarily at northern latitudes. The study did find an increase in the number of “dog days” when the average temperature is above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Obey and the Rock · 25

It also found the daily temperature range narrowing, with over- night low temperatures not as cool as they had been. Urban development, which replaces wetlands’ natural temperature modulation with pavement that radiates heat into the night air, is probably the main cause, the study concluded. Rainfall increased slightly from 1950 onward in most of North Florida, but the trend in South Florida was less clear. And there was less rain all across the state in the month of May, which the researchers theorized may signal a delayed start to the rainy season. The district team found the global models did a poor job of simulating Florida rains, especially the torrents that some old- timers call “frog chokers.” They also failed to simulate the per- vasive summer cloudiness and its blessed cooling. The district scientists asked the National Center for Atmo- spheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to run a special simula- tion that broke the state down into 50-mile squares. That came closer to reality. From its results the researchers projected Florida tempera- tures will rise by 1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2060. South of Lake Okeechobee, they predicted, almost every day will be a dog day. Temperatures will average 80 degrees or higher at least 330 days a year. North and Central Florida will see 250 to 270 dog days per year. The district scientists didn’t duplicate Mitchum’s work on sea level rise, but they did analyze the likely effect of higher seas on coastal flooding. Using tide data from the early twen- tieth century through 2008 for Key West, Pensacola, and May- port, the team compared predicted daily tide levels, which are based only on the pull of the sun and moon, to actual tides. Rea- soning that the difference between predicted and actual tides is due to sea level rise, waves, and storm surges, the researchers simulated that difference through 2050. They used conservative 26 · When the Seas Rise sea level rise estimates developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to calculate how often each city would be flooded by ocean storms. The result: the team estimated that by 2050, two-foot floods would inundate Key West once every five years. Pensacola and Mayport could expect one foot of ocean flooding about once ev- ery ten years. The team also warned that by 2050, storm-driven waves could push ocean water deep into coastal flatlands, where it could pool at the surface and seep into freshwater supplies.

* * *

How much? How soon? And what are the consequences? These questions are unlikely to have reliable answers soon. Each ac- ademic or government study starts from its own estimate of initial conditions, uses its own model, and produces its own results. “The projections are all over the place,” Obeysekera told me. “Even though we keep increasing the resolution, our models continue to have fundamental problems,” Kirtman said. “It’s important for everyone to understand what the flaws are. But just because they’re flawed doesn’t mean the information they produce is not useful.” Southeast Florida governments are putting that information to use. In 2009, officials from Palm Beach, Broward, Miami- Dade, and Monroe Counties joined together in a science and policy coalition, the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Com- pact, to assess and plan for the risks of climate change. The com- pact has developed a joint climate action plan enacted as official policy by all four counties’ elected commissioners. The compact has its own science advisory committee headed by University of Miami geology department chairman Harold Wanless. Obey- Obey and the Rock · 27 sekera is on the committee. Kirtman and other Florida Climate Institute scientists are frequent advisors. Compact members realized the four counties need to work from a shared set of sea level rise projections, so the science committee debated the merits of different methods. “The con- versations were very interesting,” Obeysekera said. “There were a lot of disagreements.” Eventually the group decided to use the Key West tide data and a method developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2009. In 15 years, the compact projects that Southeast Florida seas will be three to 7 inches higher than today. In 45 years, the pro- jection calls for 9 inches to 2 feet of sea level rise. Sometime between 2078 and 2150, the region is likely to experience 3 feet of sea level rise, the compact scientists projected. The science committee is working on revised estimates that take into account new evidence that polar ice is melting faster than expected. The new scenarios for 2030 and 2060 will be “a few inches higher,” Obeysekera said. Planners from the compact’s four counties looked at what would happen with 1, 2, or 3 feet of sea level rise, using maps produced for the compact by the South Florida Water Manage- ment District. The maps are based on updated LiDAR elevation readings taken in 2007 and 2008 for the Florida Department of Emergency Management. (LiDAR, which stands for “light de- tection and ranging,” is a remote sensing technique that uses laser pulses, usually of near-infrared light, beamed from an air- craft.) The maps don’t factor in storms or floods, but assume that sea level rises steadily throughout the area. Southeast Florida has a natural north-to-south slope, with Palm Beach the highest of the four counties and Monroe the lowest. So the effects of rising seas would be most severe in the Keys. 28 · When the Seas Rise

Two-thirds of mainland Monroe County and the Keys are vulnerable to flooding with just one foot of sea level rise, the compact’s assessment found. About half of the land on which Key West’s airport sits would be inundated; some wastewater pumping stations would be partially flooded and so would 14 of the island chain’s 17 schools. In Miami-Dade, one foot of sea level rise would submerge the cooling canals at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant and the surrounding marshes and mangroves. The plant itself is on higher ground, but the cooling canals are “extremely critical” to its operation, the compact’s planners noted. Few homes or busi- nesses would be affected, but at two feet, more than 1,300 acres of residential neighborhoods would probably be underwater. One foot of sea level rise would affect Port Everglades and Fort Lauderdale International Airport, parts of which are be- low sea level, and two feet could flood more than 1,400 acres of homes in Broward County, the planners found. In Palm Beach County, about 550 acres of homes would be inundated with a 1-foot increase. It’s important to realize that sea level rise will not stop when the projections do, Kirtman said. It’s also important not to be misled by graphs that show sea level rising in a smooth, con- tinuous curve. “That’s not the way nature behaves,” Kirtman said. Local sea levels may rise higher and faster than the projected rates, stay there for months or years, and then decline, he said. “We need to plan for [scenarios with] a ten-year period where sea level is above the upper boundary of the curve, but the next ten years will be better.”

* * * The climate compact’s assessments stopped at three feet of sea level rise. But in 2011, Florida International University geologist Obey and the Rock · 29

Keqi Zhang and colleagues used the LiDar measurements to look at the effects of higher water levels. For Miami-Dade and South Broward, Zhang found, there are tipping points at about 4 and 5 feet of sea level rise—both of which are less than the National Climate Assessment’s pro- jected upper limit for the year 2100. Below 4 feet the models show the sea creeping gradually across the landscape, Zhang found. But much of the terrain is close to 4 feet above sea level, so at 4 feet and again at 5 feet, the inundation speeds up. In the Keys the tipping points are much lower, a little over 1 foot in the Upper Keys and about 1.5 feet in the Lower Keys. Five feet of sea level rise would be “calamitous” for the Keys, “and the costs of defending against such impacts would be pro- hibitive,” Zhang and his coauthors wrote. If seas rise that much, 91 percent of the island chain would be underwater. “Civil engineering projects such as dikes or levees . . . will have limited effectiveness in this case because of the highly po- rous nature of the limestone substrate,” wrote Zhang and his coauthors. To cope with “such a severe inundation . . . will need the federal, state, Monroe County, and municipal governments to work together to create a plan for relocating the majority of the population to higher elevation areas.”

* * * Obeysekera has visited classrooms and community groups up and down the coast, talking about the compact’s projections and what they mean for the future. He usually brings along a piece of South Florida’s limestone bedrock to these talks. Often someone in the audience tells him the solution is obvi- ous: build a network of dikes, as the Dutch do, to protect high value coastal real estate. Obeysekera holds up his rock. “People usually describe it as Swiss cheese, but I don’t think 30 · When the Seas Rise it looks like Swiss cheese at all. It has more holes in it than it has rock,” he told me. He is right. Obeysekera’s rock looks more a honeycomb shredded by a hungry bear. Just a few yards from the main trails in Everglades National Park, this bedrock is in plain view, eroded by rainfall into a maze of rocky pinnacles and thigh- deep pits. Even in marshes or suburban backyards where leaf litter and soil have filled its crevasses, the subsurface limestone rock is just as porous. “Sea walls won’t work here,” Obeysekera said. “Seawater will travel underneath it, through the pores in the rock, and come up on the other side.” What, then, does Obeysekera recommend to the water man- agement district’s governing board? Should it invest taxpayers’ money in costly well field protection and flood control projects that may have a shorter than expected life span, or should it plan for a retreat from the coast? “It’s very difficult when you have deep uncertainties. You can’t even view the probabilities, and the investment costs can be very high,” Obeysekera said. New studies focused on Florida’s unique situation could help the water management districts, local governments, and businesses plan for sea level rise and other impacts. Veteran Florida scientists say some state agencies helped pay for climate change research up until 2011, but state funding for these stud- ies has dried up since then. The Southeast Florida compact has turned to NOAA and to resource policy experts at the RAND Corporation for guidance. Meanwhile, the strategy that the water management districts and the counties’ planners are following boils down to this: Plan for all possible outcomes, but spend only for the probable ones. Obey and the Rock · 31

“You plan for the next ten or twenty years, taking actions so that your options are not excluded, but you don’t invest heav- ily. Instead, you build and monitor,” Obeysekera said. “For ex- ample, Miami-Dade is going to provide the housing for a big pump station [to control salt water intrusion]. But they’ll only install one pump, even though the station can hold six.” A heartrending and costly decision to retreat from parts of Miami and other coastal cities is probably inevitable, he and other experts believe. Perhaps the decision point will come in our lifetimes. Perhaps it will be up to the next generation or the one after that. “There are some things we can do to get through the next several decades,” Obeysekera said. “At some point, we’ll have to plan for that retreat, but nobody can say when it would be.” FIELD NOTES

ON THE BEACH

There used to be a grandstand near a sand dune on the beach at Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center. On that grandstand on July 20, 1969, television cameras whirred as a rocket carrying the three Apollo 11 astronauts thundered into Florida skies, cat- apulting the men on their way to the first landing on the moon. For 15 of the most historic years in space flight, from 1967 to 1982, millions of Americans watched as Apollo moon mis- sions and the maiden flight of the space shuttle Columbia lifted off from Launch Pad 39A. Television viewers saw it all from the perspective of the grandstand, with panoramic views of the Cape and a rocket gantry in silhouette. The grandstand is gone, but the concrete slab where it stood is still a popular stop on Kennedy Space Center bus tours. It may not be long, though, before NASA has to reroute the buses. A stretch of beach that once was stable is now eroding fast and has moved inland as much as 200 feet. The incoming sea threatens a road, a deserted railroad line, sea turtle nests, and a pipeline that carries fuel to Launch Pad 39A, where space entre- preneurs are testing rockets they hope will one day carry pas- sengers to Mars and back. Two University of Florida geologists who spent five years

· 32 · Field Notes: On the Beach · 33 studying the rapid changes at Kennedy Space Center say some developed parts of the Atlantic Coast are going to see more ex- treme erosion than at any time since cities and towns were built there, as a combination of sea level rise and altered wave pat- terns change shorelines in unexpected ways. “Sea level is critical, and it’s getting a lot of attention,” said Peter Adams, an associate professor of geology. “What we’re starting to discover with the Canaveral work is that the wave climate is also changing.” By “wave climate,” Adams means a suite of characteristics— height, direction, and the time between each wave—that varies with weather and the seasons but reveals underlying patterns. On Cape Canaveral, Adams and associate professor of geol- ogy John Jaeger found nor’easters and tropical storms gener- ated waves of 16 feet or more. Steered by natural variations in elevation on the ocean floor nearby, these waves struck at differ- ent angles than normal waves and caused most of the erosion. Adams and Jaeger are among the authors of a separate 2014 study that analyzed wave height records from NOAA sea buoys along the mid-Atlantic coast. That study found that from 1975 through 2010, hurricane-generated ocean waves grew nearly 2 inches taller on average each year. Three major storms in the past ten years—Tropical Storm Fay in 2008, Hurricane Irene in 2011, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012—leveled many of the dunes that once protected NASA’s shoreline. “We saw this ourselves with Hurricane Sandy,” Jaeger said. Though the hurricane passed 200 miles off the Florida coast and never made landfall, “the damage from the storm’s waves at Cape Canaveral was tremendous. Dunes that had been stable for decades were just gone.” Lesser storms regularly overwash an abandoned railroad line behind the beach. “Almost every time we did a survey we 34 · When the Seas Rise would find sand piling up over the railroad, a graphic demon- stration that the profile of the beach is marching inland,” Ad- ams said. Barrier islands are never still, the geologists point out. If waves strike more forcefully on one end of a beach, over time they will carry sand to the other end, until the waves’ en- ergy evens out. When seas rise, barrier islands usually retreat inland. “All of this is a natural process that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years,” Jaeger said. “The problem we face now is that we have built a lot of infrastructure along the beach that is fixed in place and can’t easily be moved.” And it is exacerbated by sea level rise. “Sea level is impor- tant because it gradually moves the high-tide line farther up the beach and closer to buildable land,” Jaeger told a NASA writer. “It also allows storm surges to penetrate farther inland and more easily impact the protective dunes.” Biologists hired by NASA to monitor sea turtle and seabird nests were among the first to notice the accelerated erosion. NASA managers turned to the U.S. Geological Survey and the university researchers for an explanation. Once a month from 2009 through 2013, the geologists towed two global positioning system (GPS) transmitters behind an all-terrain vehicle to create detailed elevation maps of a 6-mile stretch of the beach. “It’s just like mowing the lawn,” Jaeger said. “We collected 50,000 to 70,000 data points per day of survey time. The preci- sion is good enough to detect variations in elevation the size of a chicken egg. And from that we could extrapolate the shoreline position as it changed throughout the seasons and from year to year.” Using NASA and U.S. Air Force aerial photographs, they tracked shoreline changes back to the 1940s. They also analyzed Field Notes: On the Beach · 35 wave heights recorded by three NOAA sea buoys anchored off St. Augustine and the Cape. There is intense debate among climate scientists about whether human-made warming of the atmosphere has changed the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, and Jaeger and Ad- ams don’t wade into that controversy. But they say there is a chain of causation between changes in the atmosphere and changing shorelines. “The oceans are warmer, and that influences global wind patterns,” said Jaeger. As ocean temperatures increase, water evaporation into the atmosphere increases. That leads to new patterns of atmospheric pressure that influence winds. And winds shape the waves that sculpt sandy shorelines. Adams and Jaeger are not predicting increased shoreline re- treat everywhere along the East Coast, but they are predicting that the patterns of shoreline movement will be different. “Areas that have been stable in the past may become ero- sional. Areas that have been erosional in the past may become stable as sand is moved from one location to another,” Jaeger said. The two geologists have begun a new project to identify the characteristics of storms that inflict heavy erosion damage on beaches, as Hurricane Sandy did. At the Kennedy Space Center, the biggest and most famous of NASA’s five coastal complexes, officials are setting aside land further inland in case it is needed for new launch pads. Mean- while, NASA has rebuilt a dune seaward of Launch Pad 39A, planting it with native vegetation to help hold the sand in place. That’s exactly what Adams and Jaeger advise waterfront landowners to do. “Do everything you can to encourage your dunes to build up,” Jaeger said. “That’s your safety buffer.” A sturdy dune line can temporarily protect oceanfront prop- erty, but it won’t stop barrier islands from flooding, the geolo- 36 · When the Seas Rise gists warn. Dunes can block storm waves, but the storm surge may breach the dunes at a low point. In some cases, storm surges produce more flooding on the bay side of a barrier island. Large infusions of sediment could help some shorelines keep up with sea level rise. But suitable sand for beach renourish- ment is already scarce, so the cost is going up. “There is a solution for all of this,” Jaeger said. “It’s the economics of the solution that’s the challenge for coastal communities.” If beaches and estuaries have a natural supply of sediment, they can keep up with rising seas on their own over the next several decades, the two geologists predict. “But the ocean does what it does,” said Adams. “Over the long haul, a hundred years or so, shorelines are all going to be retreating, because sea level is rising and overtaking them. But the pattern of retreat will not be uniform, and that’s a critical complication.” 3

COME RAIN OR COME SHINE

When people come to the elbow-shaped Big Bend between Tampa and Hillsborough Bays, it is usually to watch the mana- tees. The placid, slow-pokey sea creatures crave warm water, and there is plenty in the canals that hold bay water used to cool Tampa Electric’s Big Bend Power Station. Beyond the manatee viewing platform and the coal-burning power plant smokestacks is a tourist attraction of a geekier kind: a sprawling industrial building housing North America’s largest seawater desalination plant. The Tampa Bay Water plant siphons 44 million gallons a day from power plant canals and turns it into as much as 25 mil- lion gallons of drinkable freshwater. Seawater goes through four kinds of treatment before the crucial step, called reverse osmosis. Powerful electric motors exert nearly 1,000 pounds of pres- sure per square inch on the seawater, forcing it through mem- branes with pores about 1/100,000th the diameter of a human hair. The membranes extract salt and minerals, producing a stream of freshwater and up to 19 million gallons of brine about twice as salty as the sea. For the sake of the manatees and other marine life, the brine must be diluted before returning to the bay. Plant operators add about 70 gallons of canal water to ev-

· 37 · 38 · When the Seas Rise ery gallon of brine then discharge the blend back into the Big Bend. It takes a lot of electricity to turn seawater into freshwater through reverse osmosis. Water treated this way costs about $4 for each 1,000 gallons, compared with about $1 per 1,000 for conventionally treated groundwater. But more than 400 water treatment plants in Florida produce drinking water from un- conventional sources such as seawater, brackish water, and treated sewage, as water managers cope with a boom-and- bust seasonal cycle that sometimes lets loose with a multi-inch downpour in an afternoon and other times leaves the land as dry as sun-bleached bones. Already this cycle is more unpredictable than it was a gen- eration ago, hydrologists and water managers say. And the change comes at a time when population growth alone threat- ens to overwhelm existing water sources. It takes more than 6 billion gallons of water a day to meet the needs of the state’s 18.8 million people, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. By 2030 the depart- ment anticipates Florida will be home to 23.6 million people gulping more than 7.5 billion gallons a day. “Traditional sources of fresh groundwater will not meet all the additional demand,” concludes the department’s December 2014 water supply report. Over the next two decades, alternative sources must spring up like mushrooms after rain. The next generation of water sys- tems will blend water from rivers and wells with untraditional sources like seawater and brackish water; purified household waste water; or rainwater that has been funneled from pave- ments and cleansed of the pollution it picked up along the way. Changing weather patterns, growing populations, and the saltwater intrusion that is already affecting many coastal wells Come Rain or Come Shine · 39 are converging trends that cause sleepless nights for water managers. Florida’s rivers and lakes, bubbling springs, and deep pools of underground water all come from the same source: the 55 inches of rain that fall on the state in an average year. Unlike California and other western states, which draw most of their water from winter snowpack, we depend on rain. So the biggest, most insomnia-inducing question of all is what will happen to the rain? The answer is far from clear. So far, scientists predict that Florida will not experience the steep drop-off in rainfall and the brutal droughts predicted in California and the Southwest. But meteorologists and hydrologists do expect Florida’s water cycle to change. One change has already begun. “When I was a kid, we used to say you could set your watch to the time the rain arrived every afternoon, our little summer- time storms,” said Alison Adams, who grew up on a farm in Quincy, Florida, where her family grew vegetables for their own supper table and shade tobacco for wrapping hand-rolled cigars. “But over the last decade or so that pattern has just broken down. We might get the same amount of rain we always did, but it doesn’t come the way it used to. It comes in gully washers.” Adams, who left the farm and earned a doctorate in water resources management, is now the chief technical officer for Tampa Bay Water. The utility is the largest water wholesaler in the Southeast, supplying 2.3 million people in Pasco, Pinellas, and Hillsborough Counties. Adams is responsible for assessing the utilities’ needs 10, 20, or 50 years from now. Tampa Bay Water is the offspring of a drought and a water war. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Gulf Coast’s rainfall faltered. 40 · When the Seas Rise

Water levels plummeted in the Floridan Aquifer, the region’s only water source at the time. Amid water rationing, a groundwater pumping free-for-all pitted local water companies against one another and sucked dry the bay area’s beautiful cypress swamps and favorite fish- ing holes. Out of the flurry of lawsuits that ensued, the region- wide Tampa Bay Water was born in 1998. Today about half of its water supply comes from 13 wells tapping groundwater. The rest comes from the Hillsborough and Alafia Rivers and the de- salination plant. The utility’s 28 rain gauges have confirmed Adams’s intu- ition. The four-month rainy season still brings more than half of Tampa’s 46 inches of annual rainfall, but it comes in fewer, more intense storms. That trend holds true for most of the nation. “The prevalence of extreme single-day precipitation events remained fairly steady between 1910 and the 1980s, but has risen substantially since then,” reported the Environmental Pro- tection Agency based on NOAA records. “Eight of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events have occurred since 1990.” Will this trend of alternating dry spells and downpours hold? Will the entire state get rainier? Or will a hotter Florida have to deal with water shortages, which the National Climate Assess- ment considers “a reasonable expectation” for the southeastern United States? Wendy Graham, the director of the University of Florida Wa- ter Institute, has been working on these questions since 2006. Graham, a hydrologist and the university’s Carl S. Swisher Em- inent Scholar in Water Resources, founded the Water Institute to help water managers and farm interests better understand and deal with Florida’s water issues. Graham heads a multi-year project funded by NOAA and Tampa Bay Water that brings together meteorologists, hydrolo- Come Rain or Come Shine · 41 gists, and modelers to assess the effects of a warming climate on the Tampa Bay water supply. Their first task, much more difficult than it sounds, was to test existing climate models to see whether their results match the reality of Florida’s current climate patterns. And they don’t. “The basic problem is that Florida’s climate is affected by sea breezes that aren’t captured well,” Graham said. “Some models miss the rainy season. They can’t deal with our pop-up thun- derstorms. In some regions of the country, [future] precipitation is uncertain, and we are one of them. We can’t say yet if the future is going to be more affected by water shortages than the present.” Florida’s summer rains are almost always ocean-born. The science seems simple: In the morning, the rising sun begins heating the peninsula’s terra firma and the air above it. Warm air expands, becomes lighter, and rises. Moist sea air rushes in to fill the vacancy. Throughout the sultry day the sea air absorbs more mois- ture from lakes and marshes, lawn sprinklers, and the leaves of photosynthesizing plants. By afternoon that sea air, now hotter and more humid, rises in turn. It strikes a cooler layer of air above it, and in the confrontation, water vapor condenses into rain-giving clouds. The resulting rainstorms can be dramatic, particularly when soggy Gulf and Atlantic Coast breezes meet. But the full picture is more complex. Scientists are learning that these local ocean breezes interact with faraway oceanic and atmospheric patterns. At Florida State University’s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Studies, climate modeler Vasubandhu Misra has explored the link between Florida rainfall and El Niño and La Niña, the cyclical warming and cooling of tropical Pacific Ocean waters. Meteorologists know Florida gets warmer, wetter winters in El Niño years, when a strong west-to-east jet stream blowing 42 · When the Seas Rise across the southern United States keeps Arctic air masses away. Misra, an associate professor of meteorology, analyzed rainfall data across the southeastern states and compared it to El Niño patterns. He found that in the twentieth century, the warm El Niño flow was powerful enough to trigger the start of Florida’s rainy season. The rainy season begins in South Florida around the first of June and moves north, reaching the Panhandle in late June or early July. It stops almost precisely at the Alabama border, so it is truly a Florida phenomenon. Before the mid-1970s, the rainy season started earlier in El Niño years than it did in colder La Niña years, Misra reported. But in 1976 the tropical Pacific climate changed. The El Niño–La Niña cycle, or ENSO, became longer and more intense, and the pool of warm Pacific Ocean water shifted farther east. When Misra separated his data into two sets, one before 1976 and one after, he found an old link had been broken: Florida’s rainy season no longer starts earlier in El Niño years. And he found that the Atlantic Warm Pool, a swath of warm spring and summertime seawater off the Central American coast, also feeds into the rainy season. The Atlantic Warm Pool is the world’s second-largest mass of warm seawater, after the Pacific Ocean source of El Niño. In some years it stretches from Central America’s Caribbean coast more than halfway across the Atlan- tic Ocean’s tropical latitudes. In years when the Atlantic Warm Pool is large, the South Florida rainy season is prolonged well into October. Changes in the timing of the rainy season could have big im- pacts on farmers, who until recently consumed the lion’s share of Florida’s water but now come in second behind municipal water users, according to the Department of Environmental Protection water report. Come Rain or Come Shine · 43

And a shorter wet season with fewer, more intense bouts of rain creates a headache for utilities like Tampa Bay Water. To prevent a recurrence of the past environmental damage, the Southwest Florida Water Management District limits the amount of water the utility can pump out of the ground. And the company can’t afford to rely only on costly desalinated wa- ter. The best solution is to tap the Alafia and Hillsborough Riv- ers in the summer, when they are filled with rain, and store it for later in the year. The utility has pumps, pipes, and reservoirs designed to capture the rainy season river flow as efficiently as possible, based on historic weather records. But when the rain comes faster and less frequently, “You have to have higher and higher capacity pumps to extract the same amount of water,” Adams said. “And you can’t just swap out all of that infrastructure in a matter of days.” To try to manage some of the uncertainty about how to adapt to a warmer climate, Adams turned to Graham and the Water Institute. Scientists studying the climate contend with uncertainty ev- ery day, but the kinds of doubts they confront vary, depending on how far into the future they are looking. Researchers trying to predict the coming decade’s climate are most concerned about ocean and atmospheric cycles, like the status of El Niño. Scientists interested in understanding what the climate will look like between 2030 and 2100 must rely on models, so they need the best ones available. And when they try to simulate what conditions might be after 2100, the human factor becomes most important: will nations bring greenhouse gas emissions under control, or will carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere keep climbing? Water managers need to plan 20 to 50 years out, Adams said, 44 · When the Seas Rise so it makes sense to improve the models. And because each model has its strengths, the standard method is to test several models on the same set of facts. That is what Graham and her Water Institute colleagues did. Working with 10 global climate models that break the continent into cells of 200 by 200 miles or even larger, the modelers used a variety of methods to refine or “downscale” the models so that they could capture the unique features of Florida’s climate that powerfully affect its water cycle. To do this, researchers pick a time span in the recent past and run the existing climate models over that time, comparing the results with actual historical weather records to see how accurate they are. If the model results don’t fit the facts, they use error correction techniques to make the simulations match reality as closely as possible. There are two main techniques for downscaling global cli- mate models. In statistical downscaling, researchers look for a consistent mathematical relationship between their two tem- perature data sets—a statistical equation that, in effect, acts as a reliable road map from the real historical temperature records to the model’s simulated ones. Then they incorporate that sta- tistical relationship into the model. This process is repeated for all the other factors being used to create the model, such as pre- cipitation, wind speed, and direction. In dynamic downscaling, modelers focus on physical pro- cesses not included in the larger-scale models and write equations that capture them in detail. At FSU, Misra and his colleagues developed a dynamically downscaled model of southeastern states’ rainfall that simulates local sea breezes. The model uses cells that are about 5½ miles on each side and captures Florida’s rainy season, but it requires much more com- puting power than a global climate model. Graham and the Water Institute group applied several sta- Come Rain or Come Shine · 45 tistical downscaling methods to global models and ultimately developed their own method, which did the best job of match- ing Florida’s historic weather records. The models show Tampa Bay’s rainfall may decrease by 22 percent or increase by 11 percent between 2040 and 2070. That is about the same as today’s real-world swing from drought to drenching, Adams said. “We’re finding the uncertainty is so large that all we can say for certain is that you’re better off with maximum resilience,” Graham said. The Water Institute researchers are well into the next phase of the project: estimating future rates of evapotranspiration, and then calculating how evapotranspiration and air tempera- tures will combine to change water flows on the surface and water levels in the underground aquifer. Experts expect that when the land and air are hotter, the amount of water lost to the atmosphere from evaporation and photosynthesizing plants will be greater than it is now. So stream flows are expected to shrink and aquifer levels to drop. The Water Institute team is working to understand the magni- tude of these changes. This step is critical to a realistic picture of the state’s future water supply, because evapotranspiration is a major factor in steamy Florida. For every 10 raindrops that fall on Florida soil or are taken up by Florida plants, 7 of them return to the atmo- sphere, Graham said. Only 3 drops out of 10 will end up in a river, lake, or aquifer. That makes water storage a challenge. Under the Florida sun, shallow reservoirs evaporate so fast that they might as well be hot skillets. And they take up space that will probably be at a premium in the next century, Graham said. Deep reservoirs are another option. But levee walls have a history of failing with devastating results, as they did in 1928 46 · When the Seas Rise when a deadly hurricane ruptured the Lake Okeechobee dike and in 2005 when levees and canals failed during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. With that tragedy still fresh in their memory, people mistrust high walls holding back palisades of water, Graham said. Another method called aquifer storage and recovery involves stockpiling water underground, but because Florida’s bedrock is so porous, it’s unclear how much of it could be recaptured and how much would seep away. Graham and Adams say they hope to find solutions to what- ever water supply problems may come. “We have time to con- tinue to work on this,” Adams said. No matter what a changing climate brings, population growth alone dictates that Floridians are going to have to do better at conserving and reusing water, both women say. And they worry that as water becomes more precious, people will be reluctant to share it with Florida’s wild lands. “Right now a lot of the conversation is about how to protect the built environment,” Adams said. “But what are we doing about the bird colonies and the wildlife? People move to this state to enjoy its natural resources. “I just want folks to think about how we adapt to these changes and make sure that while we provide for the man- made environment, we provide for the natural environment as well.” LAB NOTES

HURRICANE LORE

There’s a long-standing belief among Florida weather watchers that a hurricane’s spiraling storm clouds contain a silver lining. For generations we have told one another that for all the dam- age they do, tropical storms and hurricanes are blessedly effec- tive drought busters. But in a new study, Vasubandhu Misra, the Florida State University meteorologist, found that isn’t true. Misra and Satish Bastola looked at 28 watersheds across the Southeast that experienced drought conditions for a month or more between 1948 and 2006. During those years, 71 tropical cyclones made landfall, dumping plenty of rain. But when the researchers looked at exactly where and when the spiral bands released their downpours, they found no significant overlap with drought-plagued areas. “Historically it’s very rare for a hurricane to make landfall when you have a drought,” Misra said, because the same atmo- spheric flow that reduces the strength of the normal sea breezes and leads to droughts also tends to steer tropical cyclones away from the peninsula. “Typically when hurricanes were making landfall in the Southeast, the ground conditions were already very wet,” he said.

· 47 · 48 · When the Seas Rise

Tropical storms or hurricanes do sometimes drench parched areas. But most of the Southeast’s watersheds are small, and most tropical storms’ paths are relatively narrow, Misra said. “So when a hurricane tracks through, it may hit one watershed and not another, and you may not see a widespread reduction in drought.” Will climate change lead to more hurricanes or to more vio- lent ones? That is one of the most hotly debated of all climate change questions. Some studies project there will be fewer hur- ricanes but stronger ones as the atmosphere warms. The idea is that a stronger jet stream will essentially shear the tops off most developing tropical depressions, and only the fastest-growing storms will survive. In 2014 the climate experts at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded it is “virtually certain that intense tropical cyclone activity has increased in the North Atlantic since 1970.” But whether that’s a natural variation lasting only a few decades or a new normal, it’s too soon to say. 4

INTELLIGENT TINKERING

On a balmy day in early June, Jaret Daniels drove from Gaines- ville to Florida City in an aging Ford Fiesta with a backseat full of hope. Packed into a lime green cooler barely bigger than a lunch bucket were twelve living examples of one of the world’s rarest butterflies, tucked into individual translucent waxed pa- per envelopes to keep their fragile wings motionless and safe. A bigger cooler held clear plastic cups, each with a wooden tongue depressor propped inside. Each stick supported a dust- colored pupa, resembling the dry leaf that nature had designed it to mimic. Also in the backseat, inside a nylon mesh flight cage, were more pupae nearing the end of their transformation from cat- erpillar to butterfly. Their wing cases were turning transparent as glass, revealing a vivid pattern: the black of the night sky streaked with sunset colors of yellow, orange, and blue. Two big butterflies were in the process of eclosing, the word lepidopter- ists use to describe butterflies’ emergence into the world—or in this case, into their temporary habitat in Daniels’s backseat. The flight cage was there to give the butterflies room to stretch and form their brand-new wings. Still, at least once on the southbound drive, Daniels had to pull into a Florida Turn- pike rest stop to park, pluck a butterfly out of a tight corner

· 49 · 50 · When the Seas Rise where its wings couldn’t fully open, and place it on a better perch within the net enclosure. The first hour when the wings take shape is crucial to the insects’ survival. And when you are working with the only human-reared population of the critically endangered Schaus’ swallowtail butterfly—a creature so elegant it has graced a U.S. postage stamp and so rare that in 2012 a thorough search turned up only four of them, all on a single island in Biscayne National Park—care is warranted. “I’m dealing with precious things,” said Daniels, a Univer- sity of Florida assistant professor of entomology and a Florida Museum of Natural History expert on endangered butterfly conservation. “I’m the only person allowed to breed this endan- gered butterfly in captivity and handle it. I’m entrusted with their care, and I don’t take that lightly.” Like the island chain it inhabits, the Schaus’ swallowtail butterfly is a living embodiment of the tropical Caribbean that strayed onto the North American mainland and made itself at home. This resilient creature has made it through two of the worst hurricanes on record, the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and countless other storms. It has survived at least two recent population crashes and may now be making a human-assisted comeback. But like most creatures that exist only on low-lying islands, the Schaus’ swallowtail is in danger of losing its habitat to ris- ing seas. And there’s another peril: if rainfall patterns change in Southeast Florida, the spurt of early rainy season plant growth that sustains each new generation of caterpillars may come too late or not at all. If those biological cues are mistimed too many years in a row, the butterfly could disappear for good. Other iconic Florida species are in a similar predicament. The Key deer and the Anastasia Island beach mouse, the semaphore cactus and the snowy plover, the North American crocodile, the Intelligent Tinkering · 51 loggerhead turtle, and many other rare species live or nest on the coast and face an uncertain future. If seas rise, submerging parts of the mainland, if cities move inland from the coasts, ur- banizing the landscapes that now are home to native plants and animals, and if changing weather patterns cause natural ecosys- tems to move or disappear, Florida’s wild plants and animals will increasingly find themselves islanded. “The Schaus’ is a symbol of a problem with a lot of native species in Florida,” said Daniels, whose high forehead, neatly trimmed beard, and wire-rimmed spectacles give him the look of a nineteenth-century gentleman naturalist. “These are geo- graphically island populations, and now they’re also metaphor- ically island populations, because their habitat is in little frag- ments. And they’re going to have very serious issues of habitat change.” Florida is home to at least 800 plant and animal species or subspecies that exist only in the state and its borderlands. More than 100 are listed by the federal government as threatened or endangered with extinction. Faced with an uncertain future for these living things, the scientists who study and conserve them are taking their cue from Aldo Leopold, the scientist, author, and philosopher who helped establish wildlife management as a science-based enter- prise and profoundly influenced twentieth-century ideas about the environment. “If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts?” Leopold wrote in Round River, pub- lished in 1953. “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precau- tion of intelligent tinkering.” But some cogs are easier to hold onto than others. Scientists trying to keep endangered plants and animals alive and mul- tiplying in zoos, refuges, and botanical gardens face a host of 52 · When the Seas Rise challenges, not the least of which is cost. The lion’s share of fi- nancial support for saving species from extinction goes to what conservationists call “charismatic megafauna”—creatures that are big and cute, like pandas and manatees, or thrillingly wild, like Florida panthers. Butterflies are “charismatic microfauna,” Daniels likes to say. People love them for their beauty, their darting flight, and the magical metamorphosis they undergo from ugly and squishy to light and bright. They are also among the creatures most imperiled by cli- mate change. Most butterflies are specialists that have evolved in synchrony with particular plants that grow and bloom at just the right times to protect them as eggs, feed them as larvae, and nourish them with flower nectar as adults. Any change that af- fects a host plant—say, a warmer climate that causes it to bloom earlier in spring, as many wildflowers are already doing, or a drying trend that causes some plants to die off and others to take their place—forces the butterfly that depends on it to adapt or die. The good news is that it takes less space, equipment, and money to conserve butterflies in a lab than it does to rear pan- das or whooping cranes. So Daniels and his colleagues in the Imperiled Butterflies of Florida Working Group—a nine-year- old network of biologists from the state and federal govern- ments, nonprofits, and academia—believe they have a shot at saving the charismatic butterflies of the Florida Keys, starting with the Schaus’ swallowtail. Most of the world’s butterflies spend their lives among sunny shrub lands or prairies. But the Schaus’ swallowtail in- habits the dim interior of South Florida’s tropical hardwood hammocks. Here, mahogany and gumbo limbo grow alongside Jamaica dogwood, pigeon plum, torchwood, and other Carib- Intelligent Tinkering · 53 bean castaways, covered in ferns and wild orchids, draped in vines as thick as a man’s forearm. Few other butterflies have the flight skills to navigate these leafy mazes. The Schaus’ swallowtail has evolved the ability to fly backward (a trick that human aircraft engineers have not yet mastered), hover, and move straight up or down. While other butterflies flit along the hammocks’ edges, the Schaus’ swal- lowtail prefers the forest depths, where it likes to rest with its four-inch wingspan outstretched. In the hammocks’ low light, its dark upper body helps conceal it from birds, lizards, and spiders, which might easily spot its brighter underside. The open-winged pose makes it easy to admire its ornate pattern: yellow epaulets, yellow bands running across its body, yellow highlights outlining its dark forked tail like a storm cloud backlit by the sun, and above the tail, a false “eye” as orange as a tiger’s, topped by a half-circle of iridescent blue. “It is a very showy butterfly,” said Daniels. First described in 1911 by William Schaus Jr., a roving lepi- dopterist for the Smithsonian Institution who identified or de- scribed more than 5,000 New World moths and butterflies,Her - aclides aristodemus ponceanus has no near relations on the North American mainland. Its closest kin are in the Bahamas, Cuba, and the island of Hispaniola. Experts think a few individuals were blown here by storm winds and evolved into a subspecies perfectly suited to the wooded hammocks of the Upper Keys. It has probably never lived further north than south Miami or further south than Windley Key, 85 miles from Key West, Dan- iels said. Its early life stages, egg and larva or caterpillar, last about 45 days. As a pupa, or chrysalis, it may rest in suspended ani- mation for several years. But like most butterflies, its life as an imago or winged adult is brief. Battered by storms and hunted by 54 · When the Seas Rise hungry birds, lizards, and spiders, Schaus’ swallowtails live on average a couple of weeks in the wild. So as soon as their wings are flight-ready, they get right to reproduction. Males prepare for mating by puddling, siphoning up the minerals contained in pools of standing water and storing them in “nuptial packets” of nourishment, which they transmit to the females during mat- ing to help ensure their eggs are viable. Mating may last two hours and takes place partly in flight, with the larger female carrying the male on her back. Within hours the female is ready to lay her eggs—limiting herself to just one egg per leaf, to reduce the risk that predators will eat all her offspring. She will choose torchwood, a slow-growing member of the citrus family, if she can find it. Wild lime is the more com- mon fallback. These hammock natives produce a flush of new growth a few days after the first rainy season shower. Schaus’ caterpillars feed exclusively on these two plants’ tender young leaves. The butterfly’s survival depends on the first few spring and summer rains. Most Florida butterflies have two or three gen- erations a year, and migratory species like the monarch have as many as five. But the Schaus’ swallowtail produces only one generation a year, scientists believe. Virtually all adults emerge and mate in May or June, after rain has drenched the pupae. Three to five days later, as the torchwoods’ new leaves unfurl, the season’s eggs hatch and the larvae begin to feed. At this stage, about the size of a chocolate sprinkle, they are defense- less, but as they grow, their splotchy black-and-white backs look like lizard droppings. If a predator is not fooled by the camouflage, it may be driven off by the stinky cheese smell the caterpillars exude when threatened. In midsummer they form pupae, which will release new imagos with the next year’s rains. Intelligent Tinkering · 55

If the rains fail or if hurricanes come, the pupae may lie dor- mant until the following year or longer. In July 1935, an amateur entomologist watched Schaus’ swallowtail caterpillars prepare for metamorphosis on Matecumbe Key. “When ready to transform, the larva seeks a place of seclu- sion, each for itself, fastens its anal extremity with a button of silk, and throws a heavy girdle around the thorax, supporting the body for the long sleep,” wrote F. W. Grimshawe. Less than two months later, the Labor Day Hurricane—still the most powerful hurricane in recorded history to strike the United States—inundated Matecumbe and much of the Keys. More than 400 people drowned. Along the original one-lane Overseas Highway in Islamorada, a memorial frieze carved in Key Largo limestone shows an enormous wave cresting over the island. Seeking a sign of hope in the midst of devastation, Grim- shawe returned repeatedly to the place where the Schaus’ lar- vae formed their chrysalises. Most were still there. “Half the caterpillars transforming into the chrysalis stage July 7, 1935, emerged May 8, 1936,” she wrote in Nature Magazine. “The other half remained, hatching May 13, 1937.” Island species are prone to population booms and busts. But in the mid-twentieth century the Schaus’ swallowtail popu- lation began a downward fall. Scientists don’t know exactly why, but they suspect a synchrony of factors is to blame. The primary problem is probably forest clearing for development, compounded by pesticide spraying to control mosquitoes and poaching by butterfly hunters, who sell them to collectors for up to $500 a pair. In 1976 the species was listed as threatened with extinction under the federal Endangered Species Act, and in 1984 it was given endangered status, the law’s highest protection. By the 56 · When the Seas Rise mid-1980s, the homegrown swallowtail was found only on a few small islands in Biscayne National Park and the northern tip of Key Largo, with the largest population on Elliott Key. Concerned that all of the world’s Schaus’ swallowtails were concentrated in an area so small they might be wiped out by a single hurricane, experts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser- vice, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and Biscayne National Park agreed to establish an “assurance population” at a research center outside South Florida. In May 1992, Daniels and colleagues collected some of the eggs on Elliott Key and took them back to the University of Florida, where Daniels is associate curator and director of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. Between 1995 and 1997 the university’s breeding program returned hundreds of lab-reared Schaus’ swallowtails to the wild and boosted the free-flying population to more than 1,300. Daniels grew up in Wisconsin and began raising butterflies when he was six years old. “I started with one species called a cecropia moth,” he recalled. “My grandfather would find the larvae on his tree, put them in a coffee can, and bring them over for me to rear in my bedroom.” He became a teenaged butterfly farmer, raising assorted lepidopterans, which he sold to butter- fly conservatories. Endangered butterfly conservation is a fairly new field, and researchers at the McGuire Center are pushing its limits with a mix of high-tech techniques and inspired workbench tinker- ing. In the 1990s, a McGuire center scientist facing a shortage of flower nectar to feed hundreds of lab-raised butterflies dis- covered the perfect substitute in a local grocery store: Gator­ ade. The drink, originally developed to rehydrate University of Florida football players, has now become the go-to food for butterfly farmers, Daniels said. Intelligent Tinkering · 57

Daniels and colleagues have used DNA techniques to evalu- ate the population of another endangered Florida butterfly, the Miami blue, using snippets of tissue smaller than a match head from the wings of individual insects. This tiny gray-blue but- terfly was once common in much of South Florida, but by 1999 it had only one known stronghold, in Bahia Honda State Park near the Seven Mile Bridge. The butterfly working group tasked Daniels with breeding Miami blues in the lab as the first step in a multi-agency effort to set up more populations of Miami blues in Everglades National Park and the Keys. The DNA tests showed that the remaining population of Miami blues was genetically diverse. But when a higher-than- expected number of eggs produced in captivity failed to hatch, Daniels remembered another scientist’s observation that among wild butterflies, the nutrients that male butterflies siphoned be- fore mating seemed to promote egg fertility. The team gave the males a nip of Gatorade just before mating, and the hatching improved. Although the lab-rearing techniques worked, the effort to start new populations of the Miami blue in the Everglades was a failure. The tiny butterfly lives only about five days in the wild, and though thousands of lab-raised individuals were set free at several sites from 2003 to 2009, there was never any sign that they had established wild colonies. In 2010, the Miami blue vanished from its Bahia Honda stronghold. There is only one known population left in the world, on a few low-lying islands in the Key West National Wildlife Refuge. Because of rising seas, biologists estimate that this population can last another 50 years at most. Experts from several agencies are now rethinking a conservation strategy for the Miami blue. Daniels has studied the cooperative relationship between some butterfly larvae and ants, examined the effects of forest 58 · When the Seas Rise fire on Florida pineland butterflies, and helped Monroe County officials figure out the safe distance between mosquito control insecticide spraying and butterfly havens. His laboratory’s ge- netic studies show butterflies can rebound from crises that wipe out all but a handful of their kind. That is fortunate, because in the late 1990s the Schaus’ swal- lowtail population on Elliott Key fell into a steep decline. By 2012 the decline had become a crisis. A summerlong search turned up only four adult butterflies, all males. The working group proposed a new laboratory breeding-and-release pro- gram. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved it. And ev- eryone crossed their fingers that they were not too late. They got lucky. The next year, 32 Schaus’ swallowtails emerged on Elliott Key. Researchers collected 100 eggs from two mated females and took them to the McGuire Center. They tended each larva in its own plastic cup with a sprig of wild lime leaves. Later the researchers placed tongue depressors in the cups, labeled with information on each insect’s parentage, and the pupae attached themselves to the wooden strips. “We don’t use expensive equipment,” said Daniels. “Cheap stuff that you buy in the grocery store is just as good.” The team ended up with 70 pupae. They decided to fool a few adults into emerging several months early by simulating the spring rains in the lab. “It sounds sophisticated. It’s actually just hosing them down,” Daniels said. “About 10 days later the adults start to emerge.” The trickery allowed the scientists to speed up the reproductive cycle and breed two generations in one year. By late spring 2014, there were nearly 1,000 Schaus’ swallowtail butterflies in various life stages in the Gainesville lab—about 250 times more than the known worldwide population just two years earlier. Intelligent Tinkering · 59

That year, the researchers released more than 300 laboratory- raised butterflies on Elliott Key and counted a total of 413 Schaus’ swallowtails on the island. In 2015, they released more than 450 to the wild and tallied about 300 butterflies on the 7-mile-long key. The batch of pupae and adults in Daniels’s cooler were the last to be returned to the wild in 2015. They were headed for a tropical hardwood hammock at John Pennekamp State Park on Key Largo, which was once part of the butterfly’s range and has been home to a few individuals in recent decades. On this larger and higher island, the butterfly working group hopes to establish a second population on state and federal conservation land. In his Florida City hotel room that night, Daniels hand-fed each adult butterfly from a cotton swab dipped in Gatorade. He used a felt pen to mark each animal’s wings with a unique number large enough for volunteers to identify and track it. Then he tucked each butterfly into its translucent envelope. Next morning Daniels and fellow biologists Mary Truglio of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Trudy Fer- raro of Pennekamp Park released the lab-raised Schaus’ swal- lowtails, one by one, on the edge of the tropical hardwood for- est that once covered Key Largo’s highest ground. Behind a key lime grove where yellow sulphur butterflies and bright orange Julias sipped wildflower nectar, Daniels opened the cooler and took out two envelopes—a male and female Schaus’ swallow- tail. He rubbed the male’s abdomen gently against the female’s, encouraging them to mate, then let them go. Within a few minutes three mated pairs were perched on shrubs while more Schaus’ swallowtails worked their way into the forest’s dim interior, tracing loopy flight lines as they climbed to treetop height. Within a few more minutes most of 60 · When the Seas Rise the creatures had winked out of sight, except for an occasional glimmer when a golden-edged wing caught a ray of sunlight. Daniels hoped the females would quickly find torchwood or wild lime trees and lay eggs. “This will be another good year for the butterfly,” Daniels said, “and if we continue to boost the numbers, I think the but- terfly will be in very good shape over the next five years. A stable population of about 1,200 or more, that’s the goal. But it’s important to realize that this butterfly will ultimately require management, probably forever. “I think that’s the trajectory for a lot of species on this planet right now. There are always going to be ones that require some kind of human assistance. And with climate change, what is the long-range prognosis for these guys? It’s hard to tell, but it’s certainly not an optimistic picture.”

* * * What do we know about the prognosis for the Schaus’ swal- lowtail butterfly in a time of rising seas? What about the future of all Keys wildlife—plants and animals and the natural com- munities they create together? “The Keys are ground zero for the loss of Florida’s native plants and animals,” said conservation biologist Reed Noss, a Provost’s Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Noss is a pioneer in using scientific methods to identify and conserve essential habitat for North America’s most biologically important plants and animals. He is the former vice chair of a scientific advisory committee to the U.S. Climate Change Program. “There is no place in North America where the risk of extinc- tion due to sea level rise is higher.” Ironically, Florida’s geologic history of rising and falling seas is the reason why the Keys are so rich in endemic plants and Intelligent Tinkering · 61 animals. The island chain was shaped beneath the sea as a neck- lace of coral reefs, threaded at the southern end with flat beads of marine limestone that once were tidal flats. Younger than the mainland, the Keys first rose above the sea’s surface about 100,000 years ago and were connected to the peninsula from the last ice age, which began around 85,000 years ago, until about 6,000 years ago. Living things reached the islands from the Florida mainland or the Caribbean—blown in on a storm wind, carried in a bird’s beak, or rafting on seaborne branches—and evolved differently from the relations they left behind. A few spread to the coastal ridge in Miami-Dade County, where they gradually waned away as most of their habitat was cleared for development in the twentieth century, or to the Everglades, where some still inhabit the similar islands of pines and tropical trees that rise above the River of Grass. It is these creatures’ misfortune to depend on a landscape that is exceptionally vulnerable to climate change. The island arc has a few stretches of high ground rising to 18 feet above sea level, in Key West, on Windley Key, and along a narrow ridge atop most of Key Largo. Most of the other islands in the 130-mile-long archipelago have high points of 4 to 6 feet above sea level. “We can pro- tect those habitats for a relatively short time—a few decades at most,” said Noss, “but eventually they are going to be underwater.” One of the endemic species at gravest risk is the endangered Key deer, the smallest North American deer and one of the few island creatures with a mainland heritage. Descended from the white-tailed deer of the eastern United States, it got smaller over time. At 26 to 28 inches tall at the shoulder, a typical adult Key deer is shorter than a typical American two-year-old child. A strong swimmer and an unfussy eater, it browses for food 62 · When the Seas Rise among marshes, mangroves, and tropical forests, but it needs the freshwater found only in the Keys’ pine rocklands. The Na- tional Key Deer Refuge, centered on Big Pine Key, protects most of the surviving Key deer along with 22 other endangered or threatened species. Among the refuge’s other inhabitants is the endangered Lower Keys marsh rabbit, known for its dark fur, small size, and its personal sweet spot: a habitat centered on the marsh grasses that grow between the mangrove shoreline zone and the pine forests of island interiors. The Keys’ native deer and native rabbit—not the state’s most charismatic conservation icons, the West Indian manatee and the Florida panther—will probably be among the earliest of Florida’s native vertebrates to disappear from the wild because of climate change, Noss said. Large mammals like the pan- ther and manatee can presumably move away if their habitat becomes unsuitable. He estimates the panther will likely lose about one-third of its range by 2100, since climate modelers have calculated that much of the Big Cypress National Preserve will be flooded by then. But there is still some land in the state’s interior that could sustain a panther population. Some plants and animals may be able to keep up with the pace of change, migrating inland or northward on their own. Others may need a relatively simple assist from humans, like greenways that help them cross roads and other barriers. In real trouble are the ones with no place to go: island dwell- ers or those surrounded by urban development. “These spe- cies are trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea,” said Noss. As they thought about the contrast between the species that we tend to think are the worst off and the ones actually fac- ing the harshest peril in a warmer world, Noss and several col- leagues looked at existing methods of ranking species in terms Intelligent Tinkering · 63 of their extinction risk and decided that none of the approaches were very good at factoring in sea level rise. The researchers wanted to come up with a method for predicting the effect of climate change on an entire state’s or region’s natural heritage. They looked at 300 Florida plant and animal species already classified as at risk of extinction by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission or listed in a statewide database of rarities administered by the Florida Natural Areas Inventory. They catalogued the places where each species is found today and compared those habitats with computer models’ projec- tions of a future landscape with rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, a sea level rise of 6½ feet or less, and the loss of open space to development. For each species they consulted two or more scientific experts on that plant or animal, asking how these changes would benefit or harm the species and how adaptable it might be. They also assessed each species’s eco- nomic or social value to people, its importance to the ecosys- tems it inhabits, its evolutionary distinctness, and its rarity. What species is likely to be Florida’s first loss? It’s probably the Miami blue butterfly, on its island refuge beyond Key West. In a study led by researcher Joshua Reece and published in 2013, Noss’s research team ranked that tiny butterfly—which Jaret Daniels still searches for at Bahia Honda State Park—as most likely of all Florida’s native species to go extinct by 2100. The Schaus’ swallowtail came in sixth. In between were the Keys tree cactus, which looks like an escapee from the desert Southwest but is found only in the Keys; another South Florida butterfly, the Florida duskywing; the Key deer; and the man- grove terrapin, which wears an elegant diamond-patterned shell and lives only in brackish waters of the Lower Keys. Of the 40 plants and animals the researchers ranked as Florida’s most vulnerable, 18 are found only in the Keys, and 64 · When the Seas Rise

5 others live mostly on the island chain and in some pockets of Miami-Dade County or the Everglades. Seven are butterflies, the most of any animal order. Six are beach dwellers or beach nesters, like the endangered loggerhead and hawksbill turtles and the Perdido Key beach mouse. Florida’s Gulf and Atlantic coasts are home to seven subspecies of beach mice, each one with fur as pale as the pearly white sand dunes where they breed, feed on plants, seeds, and small insects, and burrow away from predators. All but one were listed as endangered or threatened with extinction, mostly due to beach development, even before sea level rise entered the picture. Betsy Von Holle, an associate professor of biology at the Uni- versity of Central Florida, led a study that pinpointed the most heavily used nesting beaches along the Atlantic Coast, from North Carolina to Central Florida’s Sebastian Inlet, for 13 spe- cies of sea turtles, shorebirds, seabirds, and beach mice. Using a U.S. Geological Survey index of ocean beaches’ vulnerability to sea level rise, the researchers assessed the individual beaches: How steeply do they slope? How much difference is there be- tween high and low tide? How forceful are the waves? They factored in global and local sea level rise, based on a 2012 esti- mate from the IPCC of about 11 inches by 2050. Their finding: if the projected sea level rise comes to pass, three-quarters of all beaches where threatened and endangered sea turtles nest will be more vulnerable to flooding and over- wash in 35 years. Florida beaches where green sea turtles and leatherbacks now nest in abundance will be the ones most at risk, Von Holle told an audience of fellow ecologists at the Au- gust 2015 annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. As for the beach mice, “They’re already in extremely high risk areas, and that’s not going to change,” she said. Intelligent Tinkering · 65

Finned and furry creatures call to our imaginations. We see something of ourselves in their plump or wrinkled faces, their drive to survive, the forceful or guileful ways they protect their young. The state’s native fauna have charisma to burn. But with more than 400 known endemic plants compared with 40 en- demic mammals, our native flora are the richer treasures. Florida has seven hot spots where endemic and rare plants are clustered. Only two of the hot spots are inland, Noss noted. The others are coastal and therefore vulnerable to sea level rise. He predicts heavy losses of endemic plants, especially among beach and pineland ecosystems. “By definition, when an endemic species goes extinct in Flor- ida, it goes extinct globally,” Noss said. “If we care about the diversity of life, that’s important.” Some natural communities will begin to disappear in the wild long before rising seas inundate them, ecologists say. Consider the pine rocklands. These open, airy forests of slash pines—Pinus densa, the South Florida slash pine whose virtu- ally indestructible timber provided pioneers with houses, cargo schooners, and even wood-planked roads—take root wherever their taproots find freshwater on the high ground of Miami- Dade County, the Everglades, and the Keys. Growing on vir- tually bare limestone rock, they find soil in their own cast-off needles and thrive on the pinelands’ frequent flash fires. In their shelter grow more than 225 native plants, including dozens of native wildflowers, many unique to these pinelands alone. Such a forest will burn, blacken, and appear dead after a lightning strike. Just days later its rocky surface will all but dis- appear beneath explosions of red, white, and purple blooms reminiscent of a Fourth of July fireworks show. After 98 per- cent of South Florida’s pine rocklands were logged for timber or cleared for farm fields and urban development, the Interna- 66 · When the Seas Rise tional Union for the Conservation of Nature classified them as a globally imperiled ecosystem. About the time that Jack Putz and his colleagues began look- ing into the deaths of forest trees along the Big Bend, Michael Ross, an ecologist at the National Audubon Society’s Taver- nier Science Center on Key Largo, was investigating a die-off among pines on Sugarloaf Key. After studying 55 years’ worth of aerial photos, mapping dead tree trunks on Sugarloaf and nearby islands, and finding high salinity levels in groundwater below dead and failing trees, Ross and a colleague identified the same phenomenon Putz saw more than 300 miles away in Yankeetown: the forest was dying, and sea level rise was the cause. Roll the clock forward more than a decade to October 2005, when Category 3 Hurricane Wilma struck the Keys from the west, pushing a wave of Florida Bay water up to 7 feet high clear across the islands. Next came a long drought, in which the Lower Keys got less than 10 percent of their normal winter and spring rainfall. On Big Pine and Sugarloaf Keys, residents tried to sweep away or hose down the salt crust that caked their yards. Nine months after the storm had passed, sinkholes on Big Pine Key that normally captured rainwater were still filled with salty water. In autumn 2006 Ross, now an associate professor at Florida International University, began tracking a “catastrophic” die-off in the Lower Keys pine rocklands. On Sugarloaf Key’s high- est ground, about one-third of the pines were still alive, but at lower elevations virtually all were dead. The situation on Big Pine Key was similar: one year after Wilma, two-thirds of the high elevation pines were still alive, but on lower ground fewer than one-fifth survived. There were no pine seedlings, and hardly any of the usual wild herbs and flowers. Intelligent Tinkering · 67

The lesson, Ross concluded, was that relatively rapid sea level rise has encroached on the bubble of fresh, rain-recharged groundwater that keeps the pines alive. With a smaller water reservoir to draw from, the pines now have a hard time surviv- ing stresses that have always been facts of life in these islands, like hurricanes and droughts. The tropical hardwood trees that shelter the Schaus’ swal- lowtail can better tolerate saltwater, but their roots are too shal- low to reach groundwater. They depend on the rainwater ab- sorbed by layers of soil that are sometimes just a fraction of an inch thick. “It’s remarkable, really, that they could survive on the water they can squeeze out of such a small amount of soil,” said Ross, “but somehow they do.” How long can these forests last? On Elliott Key, the tropical trees grow mostly on a slim ridge 6 to 8 feet above sea level. Consider the Southeast Florida Climate Compact’s projections for an estimated 3 feet of sea level rise between 2075 and 2150. In the compact’s map of a 3-foot sea level rise, 7-mile-long El- liott Key is almost entirely underwater, with only a patch of green jutting a few feet above the waves. A baby born this year may live to see the largest island in Bis- cayne National Park disappear. But it’s unlikely the Elliott Key tropical hammock that shelters the Schaus’ swallowtail could last as long as the island does, said Ross, the expert on Keys forests. “As sea level comes up, it’s going to start eating away at the edges of the forest,” he said. “It’s going to be a gradual thing, but it will be punctuated by hurricanes and drought.” Ulti- mately, “there’s no doubt” that Elliott Key’s forest will be lost to sea level rise, probably within one or two human lifetimes, Ross believes. 68 · When the Seas Rise

If the butterfly conservation team can establish a second Schaus’ swallowtail population on Key Largo, that would buy more time. The coastal ridge that runs down the island’s spine is some of the Keys’ highest ground, from 10 to 18 feet, and it is partly held in state and federal conservation land. It’s unclear how many plants and animals imperiled by cli- mate change have safe havens available on publicly owned land. Species without any protected fallback habitat “are on a collision course between human development and sea level rise,” Reed Noss said. “There will be a tipping point when the majority of people living along the coast are no longer willing to deal with flood- ing, water shortages, increasing insurance rates, and all the other impacts of sea level rise,” Noss predicted. “At that point we can expect a mass migration inland and the conversion of most of our remaining open land to development. Native spe- cies that have stable populations now but do not have protected habitats will probably be displaced by humans. We could see a second wave of extinctions, locally and globally.” Ross, Noss, and other ecologists have a series of conservation measures that they think should be implemented right away. Some, like the Schaus’ swallowtail reintroduction program, are like emergency medicine for critically ill patients. They are meant to keep our wild heritage alive in the short term, giv- ing us time to develop long-term conservation measures if we choose. Some, like the planting and management of oyster reefs and mangrove forests, would help protect humans from storm floods while they create habitat for wildlife. Some would create publicly owned parks and reserves in new places—ones that may not seem special to us now but that could be essential wild- life havens when our grandchildren have grown old. Intelligent Tinkering · 69

Some of the ecologists’ proposals challenge us to rethink fundamental ideas about conservation and come up with new strategies for a sea-changed world, such as setting aside future habitat now, before it is needed, in places that are not likely to be submerged by rising seas. The Florida Keys can’t be re-created on the Florida mainland. The soils and rainfall would be different, and the imported spe- cies would interact in unpredictable ways with plants and ani- mals already there. But in a 2011 study, Ross and several coau- thors suggested it might be possible to save some imperiled Keys species in a geologically and climatically similar place— on the Bahamas’ higher ground. The relocated plant and ani- mal community would be its own wild ecosystem, a brave new world filled with creatures evolving on new pathways. Off-site conservation has always been a part of zoos’ work. But the notion of moving whole suites of plants and animals to higher ground is new and daunting. It presents a host of le- gal, ethical, and biological challenges. In the long run, Ross and others say, it may be more cost-effective than the alternative: keeping a few examples of Florida’s natural heritage alive in laboratories and parks, as their genetic diversity wanes, along with the wild ways that helped them maneuver through their native landscapes as gracefully as a butterfly flying backward. “Our conservation challenge in the face of sea level rise is to move beyond mythical thinking that someday things will set- tle down and the myth of perceived safety to an acceptance of change. We call for a new dialogue, a review of existing laws and policies, and preparation for the oncoming change,” Ross and his colleagues wrote in 2011, “so that we will not be left with an impoverished world.” The final outcome of this unplanned experiment is too far off for even the experts to foretell. But for now, they’re doing what 70 · When the Seas Rise they can—studying the recent past to understand the forces that will shape the future, and saving all the cogs and wheels. “I suppose you could throw your hands up, looking at the models for sea level rise, and say it’s a worthless cause,” said Daniels. “But we don’t know, ultimately, what’s going to hap- pen. And so we need to do our best to give them the ability to adapt to the changes that are coming. “If this butterfly is lost to Florida, it’s gone forever. We’re never getting it back. And that’s a travesty, I think. So as a biolo- gist I have a responsibility to make sure it doesn’t go extinct on my watch.” 5

THE WAY FORWARD

There is an unspoken hierarchy and a ritual format in many meetings between scientists and citizens. Usually the scientists speak and the citizens listen until question-and-answer time. But when Florida, Georgia, and Alabama farmers began meet- ing in small groups with climate scientists from the University of Florida and other universities in 2010, the farmers took seats in the center of the room, and the scientists asked to hear their stories. The scientists asked the cotton, peanut, or soybean growers, “How did you and your family get your start in farming? How have your methods changed over time, and why? And have you seen any changes in the climate in this part of the country?” Yes, said six out of every ten farmers. The summer rains are coming later. They are more intense. The nights are hotter. There are more summer days over 90 degrees. Spring comes earlier than it used to, and it is drier. There aren’t as many win- ter freezes as there used to be. All the trends Florida researchers had found in the past sev- eral decades’ worth of weather data, the farmers had also seen. More than half believed climate change is already happening, and more than two-thirds believed it will affect farming. They are right on both counts, said James Jones. Jones sat in on early sessions of the Tri-State Climate Working Group

· 71 · 72 · When the Seas Rise for Row Crop Agriculture, a twice-yearly series of workshops for farmers, extension agents, and climate scientists that is the brainchild of University of Florida research scientist Wendy-Lin Bartels. In the workshops farmers learn techniques for coping with extreme weather, and scientists learn which kinds of agricul- tural adaptations to a changing climate may work best in the real world. Bartels’s ongoing work is part of a research strategy that strives to be inventive and realistic, by combining traditional field studies, historical data analysis, computer simulations, and grassroots participation. Scientists are applying the same approach to other climate change adaptation work. In a three-year study marrying natu- ral and social sciences, university researchers worked with resi- dents of the Northeast Florida coast on a planning project that will allow room for towns and wildlife to step back from the shoreline simultaneously, with a minimum of conflict, as sea levels rise. Researchers say one goal in these studies is to help Floridians who will be affected by climate change understand that they have options and reasons for hope. “Hope is the key to mobilizing,” said Kathryn Frank, a Uni- versity of Florida assistant professor of urban and regional planning and the leader of the Northeast Florida study, which has, in fact, mobilized local communities to tackle the issue.

* * * For the farmers in Bartels’s group, hope comes seasoned with realism. On a website where all the group’s participants can blog, farmers and extension agents post pictures of drowned fields The Way Forward · 73 and uprooted seedlings. But they also read posts written by the state climatologist about the likely effects of the latest El Niño, compare notes on their efforts to grow drought-tolerant crops like sesame that are new to Florida, and consider how aerial drones could quickly survey thousands of acres of fields for signs of crop diseases. “Florida farmers have already had to be nimble and adapt- able,” said Jones. “I’m optimistic that they are going to be able to adapt to climate change. But no question, there are some challenges ahead for agriculture in this state.” After years in graduate school in Mississippi and North Car- olina and nearly 40 years in Gainesville, the twang of Jones’s West Texas childhood has become as soft as a cotton boll. As a teenager he loved math and engineering, but the exit door from Clint, Texas, was marked “Future Farmers of America.” The as- sociation gave him two scholarships to agricultural school at Texas Tech University, so he became an agricultural engineer. In the early 1960s when he began building a computer model of biological processes in cotton, he could count on one hand the number of scientists attempting to build crop models and on one finger the number who built one before he did. Since 1985, sophisticated computer models developed by Jones and his collaborators have helped farmers, plant breed- ers, and other researchers improve the yields of staple crops like wheat, corn, beans, and soybeans in the United States and the developing world. To help farmers in his home region respond to the local ef- fects of global change, Jones cofounded the Southeast Climate Consortium, made up of researchers from eight universities in four states who study the impact of climate extremes on water, agriculture, and the coasts. That collaboration inspired the Flor- ida Climate Institute, which Jones founded in 2010. Its mission 74 · When the Seas Rise is to foster research and help Florida communities adapt to the impacts of climate change in Florida. Agriculture is Florida’s second-largest industry after tour- ism, with $104 billion in economic impacts to the state in 2012. With mild winters that make it possible for Florida crops like tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, corn, cucumbers, and blueber- ries to find a sweet spot on grocery store shelves—just as the growing season winds down in the Southern Hemisphere and before the rest of North America is ready to harvest—Florida has the nation’s seventh-largest farm economy and is its sec- ond-largest fruit and vegetable producer after California. With California enduring a drought that is affecting U.S. food prices and facing the prospect of recurring and deepening water shortages throughout the twenty-first century, it’s likely that some of the Golden State’s vegetable and fruit growers may shift some of their operations to Florida, said Jones. Win- ters free from the risk of freezes may also open opportunities for new crops, like winter wheat. But the lack of a dormant season or winter chilling is prob- lematic for peaches and other crops. And hotter temperatures projected for Florida can cause cows to produce less milk and can lower crops’ productivity, especially when plants are get- ting ready to set fruit or seeds and during hot nights when they respire more rapidly. The National Climate Assessment’s farming experts predict that from 2070 onward, Florida and other Gulf Coast states will experience as many as 80 more hot nights per year. The assess- ment predicts nationwide declines in farm productivity and profits by midcentury, when temperatures are projected to be two to five degrees hotter, on average, than today. In a 2015 study, University of Florida researcher Davide Cam- marano worked with Jones and four other scientists to simulate the effects of hotter and cooler temperatures on corn and wheat The Way Forward · 75 in the Southeast. Cammarano found corn yields went down 13 percent for every one degree of increased temperature. And uncertainty about too much or too little rainfall has al- ways bedeviled farmers, but the farmers in Bartels’s working group say it’s more of a concern than ever. Drought can force farmers to rely on costly irrigation systems rather than rain- fall, as most Florida farmers do. Heavy downpours can keep farmers from planting, treating, or harvesting their crops, cause fungal diseases, wash away fertilizer and farm chemicals, and erode soil. There are solutions to these problems hidden in plants’ genes, Jones believes. “What are the characteristics of plants that we need to breed for so that they match not only the cur- rent environment but also the future environment?” To find out, Jones has been working with University of Flor- ida horticultural sciences professor Eduardo Vallejos and nine other collaborators to marry the techniques of molecular genet- ics with those of crop modeling. Their goal is to incorporate information about specific plant genes into crop models, which can then be used to predict which varieties should withstand scorching heat or grow in flooded fields. The models would greatly speed up the process of developing new crop varieties that can withstand extreme conditions without losing produc- tivity. In initial experiments completed in 2014, Vallejos, Jones, and their colleagues identified 14 groups of genes that control flowering in common beans. They created 184 permutations of the beans, each with a known combination of genes. The team grew each of the 184 bean cultivars in trial plots in five climate zones, from equatorial Colombia to Fargo, North Dakota. At each site they tracked high and low temperatures, day length, the sun’s intensity, soil moisture, and more, while measuring the plants’ growth and the time it took them to flower. 76 · When the Seas Rise

When the field trials were complete, the researchers had nearly 1 million pieces of information, each bit of data corre- lated to a specific group of genes. A statistical analysis revealed which sets of genes for flowering acted in response to tempera- ture, day length, or other factors, and how the plant’s growth was affected by each unique set of interactions between genes and environment. Feeding that information into their crop model, the research- ers successfully simulated by computer the results they ob- tained in the field. As a result, Jones said, they are close to the point when a crop model will be able to predict exactly which combination of genes in a plant strain will do best under which set of conditions—such as climate extremes. “We believe this can be done,” Jones told a group of about 60 plant scientists who came to Gainesville in July 2015 from Latin America, Asia, and across the United States to learn the researchers’ methods. “But you should not go away thinking that we have all the problems solved. There’s still a lot of work to do.” The problems are just as perplexing in the field as in the lab. For example, the National Climate Assessment predicts that 37,500 acres of Florida farmland will become unusable because of saltwater intrusion by 2100. Even then, farmers may be able to adapt, Jones said. If groundwater becomes brackish, they may grow crops in raised beds with drip irrigation. If the sun’s heat becomes too intense, they can use greenhouses to provide cooling shade. But these methods are costly, and Jones expects land prices will also rise as the state’s population grows and, perhaps, moves inland from the coasts. That means traditional southern row crops like corn, cotton, and peanuts may be squeezed out of the state, he said. These crops take up a lot of land and don’t return as much profit per acre as tomatoes, strawberries, and The Way Forward · 77 other fruits and vegetables, which will probably expand their range. Tropical crops that now grow only in the southernmost counties, like mangoes, papayas, bananas, and Asian and Latin American vegetables, may become important new crops statewide. “It’s going to be very competitive, and not only within the United States,” Jones said. “There will be other places that can grow these high-value crops. So our future agriculture will need to be much more efficient in terms of resource use, particularly water.” Such sweeping changes are not yet part of the conversation at the Tri-State Climate Working Group for Row Crop Agricul- ture. But many of the farmers have begun using cover crops, which are planted in winter and plowed under in spring, to help prevent erosion and lost nutrients during heavy rains. Others are experimenting with sesame, a low-risk crop that can thrive without irrigation or fertilizers at the edges of fields planted with other crops. Still others are using drip irrigation and other techniques that deliver precise amounts of water and fertilizer to crops. “The farmers are discussing how well these strategies work under different conditions,” wrote Bartels in an e-mail. “The magic of the group, for me, is witnessing farmers learning from one another.”

* * * As a child, Patrick Hamilton spent barefoot summers exploring the bays, marshes, sand hills, and woods along the Matanzas River. The river, which is really a brackish water estuary, sepa- rates Anastasia Island from the mainland, with St. Augustine at its north end and the Spanish conquistadors’ Fort Matanzas to the south. 78 · When the Seas Rise

Tarpon jump and dolphins roll in its waters, where mullet, snapper, grouper, flounder, snook, and young bluefish provide plentifully for nesting bald eagles. In the salt marshes rimming the river, wading birds feast on shrimp, crabs, lizards, frogs, and snakes. Forested freshwater creeks feed the marshes. Far- ther upslope are sand hills and pinewoods where cranes dance, black bears forage, and bobcats hunt. Endangered gopher tor- toises dig long burrows in the dunes, often sharing them with rabbits, opossums, raccoons, and endangered Anastasia Island beach mice. With North America’s oldest city and a handful of beach towns planted on its shores, the 334,000-acre Matanzas River basin is not pristine. Oyster populations are down, and algae blooms often cloud its waters. Still, its Guana-Tolomato-Matan- zas National Estuarine Research Reserve, a NOAA-affiliated, state-run 73,000-acre tract set aside for conservation and re- search, is one of the least disturbed expanses of marshes, creeks, and bays on Florida’s Atlantic Coast. Hamilton grew up to become a Crescent Beach real estate agent and lobbied for the creation of the reserve, which was dedicated in 1999. “This place is still healthy,” he said, “but you don’t have to have a lot of insight to see that if you don’t take protective action, things might change in ways that you don’t like.” So when the reserve director and University of Florida re- searchers called for citizens to sit on the steering committee of a three-year study on sea level rise in the Matanzas Basin, Ham- ilton signed up. Joining him on the committee were 13 other residents, including a developer, a timber company executive, a kayak outfitter, a land trust manager, the Matanzas River keeper, and planners from nearby city, county, and regional governments. The Way Forward · 79

Their purpose was to ground-truth and help guide a study that provides citizens of the region with a view of the future and gives them options for shaping it. The research team’s basic findings: the region’s marshes and some of its municipalities will be profoundly altered by 3 feet of sea level rise, which is expected to affect Northeast Florida by 2100. But with careful planning the community can allow the Matanzas basin’s natural ecosystems to migrate inland, pre- serve future habitat for most of its iconic plant and animal life, protect freshwater sources, and accommodate projected popu- lation growth with a modest increase in the density of residen- tial neighborhoods. Led by Kathryn Frank, a University of Florida assistant professor of urban and regional planning, the multifaceted re- search project offers reserve managers and residents the infor- mation and planning tools they need to make long-term deci- sions about how to adapt to sea level rise. “It will ultimately be up to local decision makers, leaders, and residents to decide which planning course they would like to chart,” Frank said. “Our goal was to develop a process of planning for sea level rise based on local input and the best available science. Our hope is that it could be a model for other communities throughout the nation.” The study was born out of conversations between Frank and Michael Shirley, director of the Guana-Tolomato-Matanzas Na- tional Estuarine Research Reserve. The reserve runs along the coast from north of Ponte Vedra Beach to south of Palm Coast, encircling St. Augustine and encompassing three connected estuaries, the Guana, Tolomato, and Matanzas Rivers. Shirley, who has a doctorate in marine science, knows climate change is already affecting the reserve. The northernmost mangrove stand on the Atlantic Coast is on the reserve. 80 · When the Seas Rise

Most of the land west of the reserve is farmland or timber- land, so if landowners are willing to sell, reserve managers can plan for the inland movement of salt marshes. This can happen naturally if the pace of sea level rise is slow enough for plants to keep up. The reserve overlaps Flagler and St. Johns Counties, with a combined 2010 population of 286,000. The two counties are pro- jected to add another 511,000 people over the next 50 years. At that pace, Frank knew the needs of humans and nature would eventually conflict. She thought it was possible to accommo- date both. “We didn’t want to talk to residents only about the natural areas,” Frank said. “Most people, while they care very much about the natural environment, are also going to want to know, ‘What about my house and my town?’” So the study area in- cluded most of the research reserve, from St. Augustine to its southern boundary, along with a 3-mile-wide buffer to the west, and the cities and towns that lie just outside its boundaries. Scientists mapped the effects of sea level rise on the region, using the Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM). They found that at 3 feet of sea level rise the estuarine research re- serve, which sits on the lowest land in the watershed, would be most affected. About 4,200 acres of the reserve’s salt marsh, roughly one-third of this highly productive habitat, would turn to open water. But St. Augustine’s historic district, which already endures king tide floods, would also be dramatically altered. Three feet of sea level rise would flood the Castillo de San Marcos, the city’s seventeenth-century Spanish fortress, and parts of its historic districts. All told, about 3,700 acres of dry ground in St. Augustine and 900 acres in Palm Coast would become salt marsh, tidal flats, or open water. The Way Forward · 81

The researchers added in the effects of projected develop- ment and found that conversion of open space to cities and sub- urbs would cause proportionally greater impacts on the natural areas than sea level rise. Three feet of sea level rise would inun- date about 8 percent of the region’s most biologically valuable natural landscapes—the biodiversity hotspots that shelter the greatest variety of native plant and animal life. Projected devel- opment would impact another 11 percent of this very important habitat. More than 19,000 acres, about one-fifth of all the area’s conservation lands, would be lost to the combined effects of 3 feet of sea level rise and 45 years of urbanization. University of Florida biologist Tom Hoctor assessed the im- pacts of those losses on iconic plants and animals. The three endangered sea turtle species that nest on Anastasia Island beaches would lose two-thirds of their habitat, mostly to sea level rise. The Florida mink would lose nearly half of its domain. Black bears, river otters, indigo snakes, sandhill cranes, swallow- tailed kites, and migratory songbirds would each lose about one-fifth of the habitats where they breed, feed, and nest. Mean- while, birds that rely on open water—wild ducks, pelicans, and others—would gain habitat. Many species could regain some lost habitat in open lands west of the reserve, Hoctor found. In fact, conservationists could create a wildlife corridor linking the area’s black bears with those in the Ocala National Forest. Next, land use specialists compared these potential wildlife habitats with existing zoning, infrastructure, and development plans. There were some areas where future wildlife habitat and future development overlapped. The researchers mapped them. At public meetings attended by about 325 people between 82 · When the Seas Rise

December 2012 and June 2013, the team summarized its find- ings and asked audience members to help turn problems into solutions. “We must contemplate our legacy,” said research team mem- ber Dawn Jourdan. “We ask you to help us begin this difficult conversation.” The researchers asked community members to help define goals for the study’s next stage. They found residents especially valued the area’s salt marshes, its diversity of flora and fauna, and its good water quality and wanted to preserve natural buf- fers from storm surges and erosion, nursery areas for fish, and areas that naturally filter groundwater. With those guideposts, members of the research team de- vised scenarios that steered new development to higher ground, moved some vulnerable buildings away from areas likely to be inundated by storm surges, and encouraged new construction to fill in vacant land in upland areas that are already developed. Among other ideas they outlined were the elevation of some existing buildings; voluntary buy-outs of property owners; transfer of development rights from properties in low-lying ar- eas to those on higher ground; zoning and tax incentives that encourage developers to cluster buildings together to conserve open space; and conservation easements. The study’s final re- port included sample legal language to implement these steps and others. In a separate 2015 survey, research team member Thomas Ruppert, an attorney and coastal planning specialist for Florida Sea Grant, found that 11 coastal counties and 18 towns have al- ready taken steps to incorporate sea level rise into their commu- nity development plans. For example, the federal government offers grants to coastal communities seeking financial help to protect vulnerable coastal areas from flooding, and a recent change in Florida law gives counties and towns the option of The Way Forward · 83 adding areas likely to be affected by sea level rise to their desig- nated high-risk zones. The town of Satellite Beach, population 23,000, was the first Florida community to redraw its high-risk maps to include areas that would be inundated by 1 foot of sea level rise. Fort Lauderdale and three other local governments have followed suit. Northeast Florida counties and towns have not incorporated sea level rise into comprehensive plans or local ordinances, according to Ruppert’s survey. But in November 2013, Margo Moehring, a staff member for the Northeast Florida Regional Council, who also served on the steering committee for the Matanzas River basin study, won the council’s approval for an initial sea level rise action plan. In December 2014 the North- east Florida Regional Council brought together business lead- ers and government officials for monthly conversations about cost-effective ways to adapt to sea level rise. “People in this area have not been paying attention to sea level rise, but the study changed that,” said Hamilton, the steer- ing committee member. “It got people talking about the issue.” The researchers have provided all of their work to local gov- ernments and posted it on a website, PlanningMatanzas.org. “I think the thing that local people care most about is our data,” Frank said. “It gives them a starting point if they choose to fol- low up.” Most important, the study’s approach offers Floridians who are concerned about sea level rise a way to deal with a confus- ing, potentially paralyzing welter of dates and maps and wave height curves. “You can begin to plan by using scenarios,” said Frank. “You don’t have to wait for certainty.” Despite decades of hard work, climate scientists have not been able to agree on a single set of sea level projections. Nor do they expect to be able to do that until it becomes clear whether 84 · When the Seas Rise people and governments are willing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. How fast? How soon? These are questions we can’t answer yet. And what will the consequences be? That depends, in part, on how soon we begin to prepare for the sea changes to come. FIELD NOTES

OF ISLANDS AND ICE

Before Andrea Dutton was a geologist, she was an amateur gymnast. So when her field research on sea level rise required her to free-climb granite cliffs in search of fossil corals, carrying a surveyor’s tripod, a drill, and a jug of seawater, that ingrained nimbleness was a big help. On the beaches of the Seychelles Islands, Dutton and col- leagues were looking for intact corals that once grew just below the surface of the Indian Ocean some 125,000 years ago, the last time Earth was warm enough to cause glaciers to retreat. To- day some of those corals stand 25 feet above the beach, resting on granite boulders. The tropical rains and sea air have eroded the granite into billows as smooth as gray silk, and few of the ancient corals are intact. But those that survived may help us understand how much sea levels could rise if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their present rate. Dutton, a University of Florida assistant professor of geol- ogy, is an expert on the paleoclimate, or Earth’s climate at ear- lier periods in geologic time. Since climate models alone cannot narrow the uncertainty about sea level rise, paleoclimatologists look to ancient corals, sediments, ice cores, and other records that shed light on past patterns of sea level rise. Though the

· 85 · 86 · When the Seas Rise geologic record can’t tell us what will happen in this century, it can give us longer-term information that we would be wise to take seriously, Dutton believes. “In discussions about climate change and sea level rise, the year 2100 comes up a lot,” Dutton said. “But sea level is not go- ing to stop rising in 2100. And so people latch onto the numbers describing what sea level is going to be like in 2100 but don’t realize that the decisions we’re making now could commit us to consequences that are much higher than that.” Melting glaciers and expanding seas have contributed most of the sea level rise recorded since the start of the industrial age, but for the rest of this century scientists expect the melting of the polar ice sheets to be the main factor. Recent studies show the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster than in the 1990s. But are they nearing a tipping point of rapid ice loss? And does that mean sea level rise will speed up? In her latest study, published in July 2015 in Science, Dut- ton headed a team of experts from the United States, Canada, Britain, and Germany who used multiple lines of evidence to reconstruct sea levels during three past warm periods. In each case, the results showed that when either temperatures or at- mospheric carbon dioxide reached today’s levels or a little bit higher, sea levels rose by 20 feet or more. The Science study did not pin down how much time it took to reach peak sea levels in each of those warm periods. But Dut- ton’s fieldwork in the Seychelles suggests most of the increase came near the beginning of Earth’s last warm period, when temperatures at the poles were a few degrees warmer than they are today. That warming cycle, which took place between 120,000 and 130,000 years ago, was brought on not by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but by natural variations in Earth’s orbit that increased the amount of sunlight reaching the surface. Field Notes: Of Islands and Ice · 87

So it isn’t a perfect analog to today’s climate, but it is the period with the most reliable geologic evidence. Dutton chose the Seychelles because the islands’ elevation is not affected by geologic factors that could confound sea level measurements. Resting more than 900 miles off the East African coast, the islands are not part of an active tectonic plate—that is, they are not on a moving piece of Earth’s crust. Nor are they close to landmasses that sank into Earth’s mantle, weighted down by massive ice sheets during the last ice age, and have been slowly rebounding ever since the ice sheets withdrew more than 18,000 years ago. Cars are not allowed on some parts of the Seychelles, so the geologists usually walked or biked, carrying their gear. They subsisted mostly on cans and jars from local shops—pasta, tuna, mayonnaise, and Nutella. Lacking Wi-Fi access, Dutton had only one brief Skype conversation with her two young children. The team sampled many ancient corals that were still intact, carefully surveyed their elevations, and took samples. Since corals can grow at different depths, they used clues like the cor- als’ species, or the types of fossilized algae attached to them, to reconstruct each specimen’s position on the reef and estimate the depth where it formed. The samples were purified in Dutton’s Gainesville clean lab, where researchers wore gloves, goggles, and jumpsuits to avoid contaminating the corals with trace metals. Next, a mass spec- trometer scanned each sample for variants of uranium and its daughter element, thorium. The corals take up uranium, but not thorium, from seawater, and uranium breaks down into thorium at a fixed rate, so the researchers could calculate the age of each sample by comparing the ratio of the two elements in it. By plotting each sample’s age and elevation on a graph, the 88 · When the Seas Rise researchers were able to track the rising seas on the Seychelles some 120,000 to 130,000 years ago. They found that seas had risen by about 20 feet overall. The researchers found thermal expansion of the oceans could account for less than 2 feet of the sea level rise they saw in the Seychelles. They hypothesized that a sizable fraction of the Antarctic ice sheet melted, raising sea levels about 15 feet, be- fore the Seychelles corals began growing. After that, seas rose gradually due to the slower, partial melting of the Greenland ice sheet, they concluded. After those results were published in 2015, Dutton’s research team reviewed all the available evidence from field studies, cli- mate models, ice sheet models, and sea level models to assess patterns of sea level rise during two earlier warm cycles and the last interglacial period. In all three time periods, they found, temperatures 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today’s led to sea level rise of at least 20 feet. The temperatures at the poles during the past warm periods were comparable to those predicted in the next few decades if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere do not level off at 450 parts per million or less. Only the oldest time period they studied, about 3 million years ago, also had atmospheric carbon dioxide levels close to today’s. Because scientists can’t reliably estimate the planet’s shape so long ago, and because of other uncertainties, the team considered estimates from that period, called the Mid-Pliocene warm period, unreliable. But for the other two warm cycles, only the loss of large amounts of polar ice could explain such extensive sea level rise, the researchers found. In spring 2016 Dutton plans a new project in the Florida Keys, where the fossil corals that underlie most of the islands began forming about 120,000 years ago, in synchrony with the Seychelles reefs. She hopes to sample corals at Windley Key, un- Field Notes: Of Islands and Ice · 89 earthed in the early 1900s when crews working for Henry Flag- ler quarried the ancient reef for stones to build the Overseas Railroad. Using the dating technique she used on the Seychelles samples, which is accurate to within about 50 years, she hopes to find out how quickly sea levels rose and whether the pace varied over time or stayed constant. “That’s one of the fundamental questions my group is trying to answer,” Dutton said. “As the polar ice sheets retreat, are they going to do it gradually, or are we going to see a sudden collapse of some sector of an ice sheet so that we get a step-like rise in sea level?” No one alive today will live long enough to see 20 feet of sea level rise, but this generation may be the last one with the op- portunity to prevent sea changes that would be calamitous for the world’s coastlines. “It has become all the more relevant now that I have chil- dren,” Dutton said. “I worry about them and their children.” “We may not be committed to the whole 20 feet yet,” she said, although “that argument is becoming more difficult to make as time marches on. I think it’s extremely important for the whole society to understand what is happening to our Earth, how much of it we are responsible for, and not only what’s going to happen but, maybe, how we can change that future pathway.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to Meredith Morris-Babb, director of the University Press of Florida, for the opportunity to write When the Seas Rise: Global Changes and Local Impacts. Special thanks go to the writers Cynthia Barnett and Aaron Hoover, whose many kindnesses were essential to this project. I am inspired by their talent and blessed by their friendship. At the University of Florida, Jack Payne, Senior Vice Presi- dent for Agriculture and Natural Resources, generously shared key insights on climate change research. Steve Orlando, direc- tor for print media at the Office of News and Public Affairs, and Carolyn Cox, coordinator of the Florida Climate Institute, made valuable introductions and answered innumerable questions. Faculty members Song Liang, Jonathan Martin, Bill Pine, and Sadie Ryan, and PhD students Katie Glodzik and Amy Lang- ford, were especially helpful. I am grateful to Florida International University Professor Michael Sukop, who leads the South Florida Water, Sustainabil- ity, and Climate Project, and Nancy Schneider, senior program officer of the Institute for Sustainable Communities at Florida Atlantic University. Most of all, I am grateful to the researchers whose work is featured in When the Seas Rise: Global Changes and Local Impacts. They were exceptionally generous with their time and knowl- edge, and patient in correcting my mistakes. Any errors that persist are entirely mine.

· 91 ·

NOTES

Chapter 1. Nature’s Billboards A Tampa Bay physician was among the first: Author interview with Francis E. Putz, July 28, 2015. Driving west from Gainesville: Gillespie Museum at Stetson University website, Sandhill Ecosystems. Accessed Aug. 24, 2015, at http:// www.stetson.edu/other/gillespie-museum/vse/sandhill- ecosystems.php. Bald eagles outnumber people here: Laura Geselbracht, Kathleen Freeman, Eugene Kelly, Doria R. Gordon, and Francis E. Putz. 2011. “Retrospective and Prospective Model Simulation of Sea Level Rise Impacts on Gulf of Mexico Coastal Marshes and Forests in Waccasassa Bay, Florida.” Climatic Change 107 (1–2): 54. This is biologically rich country: H. Castaneda and F. E. Putz. 2007. “Predicting Sea-Level Effects on a Nature Preserve on the Gulf Coast of Florida: A Landscape Perspective.” Florida Scientist 70 (2): 167. “But what emerges from our studies is that its elevation”: Kimberlyn Williams, Katherine C. Ewel, Richard P. Stumpf, Francis E. Putz, and Thomas W. Workman. 1999. “Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Forest Retreat on the West Coast of Florida, USA.” Ecology 80 (6): 2045–63. As people burn fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases: IPCC. 2014. “Summary for Policymakers.” In Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. O. Edenhofer et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press), 4. Accessed Sept. 8, 2015, at http://ipcc.ch/pdf/ assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf. Sea levels are rising along most of the world’s shorelines: Ibid., 4, 6.

· 93 · 94 · Notes to Pages 3–7

In 1990, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report: Steven H. Wolfe, Robert W. Simons, Reed E. Noss, Jeffrey A. Reidenauer, Michael S. Flannery, and Michael J. Bland. 1990. “An Ecological Characterization of the Florida Springs Coast: Pithlachascotee to Waccasassa Rivers.” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Biological Report 90 (21). Accessed Aug. 17, 2015, at http://aquaticcommons. org/172/. In spring 1992, the University of Florida researchers marked: Williams et al. 1999, 2047; Francis E. Putz. 2012. “Coastal Forests Retreat as Sea Levels Rise,” Palmetto 29 (1): 8–11. “These stands are effectively dead already”: Williams et al. 1999, 2046. A 2005 follow-up study showed the forests were declining: Larisa G. DeSantis, Smriti Bhotika, Kimberlyn Williams, and Francis E. Putz. 2007. “Sea-Level Rise and Drought Interactions Accelerate Forest Decline on the Gulf Coast of Florida, USA.” Global Change Biology 13: 2358. A companion study showed that between 1973 and 2003: Castaneda and Putz 2007, 166. Researchers have used a computer model called SLAMM: Geselbracht et al. 2011, 36. The Big Bend’s coastal forests are rapidly retreating: Williams et al. 1999, 2059. One place to see them: Interview with Putz. Another is in Miami-Dade County: Author observation, 1990–2015. To turn back the tide, the city spent $100 million: Laura Parker. Feb. 2015. “Treading Water.” National Geographic. Accessed Aug. 10, 2015, at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/ climate-change-economics/parker-text. “Sunny-day floods” are the new normal: Talk by Alison Higgins, City of Key West sustainability coordinator, “Resilient Redesign II,” Florida Atlantic University, July 22, 2015. Seawater is seeping into municipal water wells: Andy Reid. 2011. “South Florida Drinking Water Faces Saltwater Threat.” Sun Sentinel, Sept. 12, 2011. Accessed Aug. 21, 2015, at http://articles.sun-sentinel. com/2011-09-12/health/fl-saltwater-intrusion-20110912_1_ saltwater-intrusion-saltwater-threat-drinking-water. A study by former University of Florida researcher Jennifer Seavey: J. R. Seavey, W. E. Pine III, P. Frederick, L. Sturmer, and M. Berrigan. 2011. “Decadal Changes in Oyster Reefs in the Big Bend of Notes to Pages 7–9 · 95

Florida’s Gulf Coast.” Ecosphere 2 (10): 1. Accessed Aug. 25, 2015, at http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/ES11-00205.1. And a new tropical wave is moving up the peninsula: Kyle C. Cavanaugh, James R. Kellner, Alexander J. Forde, Daniel S. Gruner, John D. Parker, Wilfred Rodriguez, and Ilka C. Feller. 2014. “Poleward Expansion of Mangroves Is a Threshold Response to Decreased Frequency of Extreme Cold Events.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences111 (2): 723–27. “I think this idea of tipping points in the earth’s ecosystem”: Justin Gillis. 2013. “Spared Winter Freeze: Florida’s Mangroves Are Marching North.” New York Times, Dec. 30, 2013, A14. Accessed Aug. 25, 2015, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/science/without- winter-freezes-mangroves-are-marching-north-scientists-say. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Cavanaugh predicts that over the next 50 years: Author interview with Kyle C. Cavanaugh, Aug. 12, 2015; Kyle C. Cavanaugh, John D. Parker, Susan C. Cook-Patton, Ilka C. Feller, A. Park Williams, and James R. Kellner. 2014. “Integrating Physiological Threshold Experiments with Climate Modeling to Project Mangrove Species’ Range Expansion.” Global Change Biology 21: 1928–38. Other researchers are finding mangrove patches in Texas and Louisiana: Symposium speakers Anna Armitage, Texas A&M University; Christopher Gabler, University of Houston; and Michael Osland, U.S. Geological Survey National Wetlands Research Center. 2015. “Coastal Plant Range Shifts: Causes and Consequences.” Ecological Society of America annual meeting, Baltimore, Aug. 12. Of all the world’s trees, only mangroves are tough enough: Interview with Putz. Swimming among their prop roots is an all-you-can-eat: South Florida Aquatic Environments—Mangrove Life, Ichthyology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Accessed Aug. 25, 2015, at http:// www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/SouthFlorida/mangrove/Life.html. In a study conducted in and around the Kennedy Space Center: Cheryl Doughty, J. Adam Langley, Wayne S. Walker, Ilka C. Feller, Ronald Schaub, and Samantha K. Chapman. 2015. Mangrove Range Expansion Rapidly Increases Coastal Wetland Carbon Storage. Published online, Estuaries and Coasts. She estimates that if Florida’s mangroves expand: Author interview with Cheryl Doughty, Aug. 12, 2015; Cheryl Doughty. 2015. “Coastal Plant Range Shifts: Causes and Consequences.” Oral presentation, Ecological Society of America annual meeting, Baltimore, Aug. 12. 96 · Notes to Pages 9–13

“We know that Florida is in the crosshairs”: Author interview with James W. Jones, July 27, 2015.

Chapter 2. Obey and the Rock Obeysekera grew up in Sri Lanka: Author interview with Jayantha Obeysekera, July 7, 2015; South Florida Water Management District: Our Mission, accessed Sept. 10, 2015, at http://www.sfwmd.gov/ portal/page/portal/xweb%20about%20us/sfwmd%20about%20 us. Its water sustains an astonishing array of wildlife: Florida Natural Areas Inventory and Florida State University. Apr. 2015. Acres of Conservation Land by County. Accessed Sept. 10, 2015, at http://fnai. org/pdf/MAxCounty_201504.pdf. Lacking North Florida’s abundance of rivers and springs: James A. Miller. 1977. Hydrogeology of Florida. In The Geology of Florida, ed. Anthony F. Randazzo and Douglas S. Jones (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 76–77. At more than 1 million acres, the Everglades: J. Obeysekera, J. Park, M. Irizarry-Ortiz, P. Trimble, J. Barnes, J. VanArman, W. Said, and E. Gadzinski. 2011. South Florida Water Management District, Past and Projected Trends in Climate and Sea Level for South Florida, Hydrologic and Environmental Systems Modeling Technical Report. Accessed Sept. 8, 2015, http://floridawca.org/sites/default/files/ documents/S.FLclimate_past_projected_trends.pdf. The River of Grass has been replaced: South Florida Water Management District. Managing and Protecting Water. Accessed Sept. 10, 2015, at http://www.sfwmd.gov/portal/page/portal/sfwmdmain/ managing%20%20protecting%20water. Obeysekera and the Hydrologic and Environmental Systems Modeling Group: South Florida Water Management District. South Florida Water Management Model. Accessed Sept. 10, 2015, at http://www. sfwmd.gov/portal/page/portal/xweb%20-%20release%202/ south%20florida%20water%20management%20model. If seas rise another 6 inches: Interview with Obeysekera; Joseph Park, Jayantha Obeysekera, Michelle Irizarry, Jennifer Barnes, Paul Trimble, and Winifred Park-Said. 2011. “Storm Surge Projections and Implications for Water Management in South Florida.” Climatic Change 107 (1/2): 122. “We have many structures built fifty years ago”: Jayantha Obeysekera. Nov. 15, 2011; “Climate Change and Sea Level Rise in Florida.” Keynote address to the Florida Climate Change Task Force. Video Notes to Pages 13–15 · 97

accessed Sept. 8, 2015, at http://training.ifas.ufl.edu/FCI_11/SUS04_ Obeysekera/index.htm#. These are the main issues Obeysekera worries about: Ibid.; Obeysekera et al. 2011, xviii. “Of all the ongoing and expected changes”: Orren Pilkey and Rob Young. 2009. The Rising Sea (Washington, D.C.: Island Press). In Reed F. Noss, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Florida’s Unenviable Position with Respect to Sea Level Rise.” Climatic Change 107 (1–2): 3. When economists tally up the likely costs of rising seas, they rank Florida as the most vulnerable state . . .: Fiona Kinniburgh, Mary Greer Simonton, and Candice Allouch. 2015. Come Heat and High Water: Climate Risk in the Southeastern United States and Texas. Risky Business Project, General Trends: Florida, 31.Accessed Sept. 12, 2015, at http://riskybusiness.org/site/assets/uploads/2015/09/ Climate-Risk-in-Southeast-and-Texas.pdf; Jerry M. Melillo, Terese Richmond, and Gary W. Yohe, eds. 2014. Highlights of Climate Change Impacts in the United States. Third National Climate Assessment. U.S. Global Change Research Program, 73. Accessed Sept. 8, 2015, at http://www.globalchange.gov/sites/ globalchange/files/NCA3_Highlights_LowRes-small-FINAL_ posting.pdf. . . . and Miami as one of the most vulnerable major cities in the world: R. J. Nicholls et al. 2008. Ranking Port Cities with High Exposure and Vulnerability to Climate Extremes: Exposure Estimates. OECD Environment Working Papers, no. 1, 28. Accessed Sept. 10, 2015, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/011766488208. In an interesting twist, studies show Florida and the Southeast: Obeysekera et al. 2011, 39–41; V. Misra, E. Carlson, R. K. Craig, D. Enfield, B. Kirtman, W. Landing, S.-K. Lee, D. Letson, F. Marks, J. Obeysekera, M. Powell, and S.-l. Shin. 2011. Climate Scenarios: A Florida-Centric View, 4. Florida Climate Change Task Force. Accessed June 24, 2015, at http://floridaclimate.org/whitepapers/; Michelle M. Irizarry-Ortiz, Jayantha Obeysekera, Joseph Park, Paul Trimble, Jennifer Barnes, Winifred Park-Said, and Erik Gadzinski. 2013. “Historical Trends in Florida Temperature and Precipitation.” Hydrological Processes 27 (6): 2225. Accessed Sept. 10, 2015, at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hyp.v27.15/issuetoc. So far, scientists say, the world’s terrestrial warming trend: Melillo et al. 2014, 5. 98 · Notes to Pages 15–17

. . . since humans first settled on the coast more than 8,000 years ago: Florida Museum of Natural History, Randell Research Center. Precolumbian Cultural Chronology for Caloosahatchee Region, accessed Sept. 20, 2015 at http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/rrc/online. htm#Prehistoric%20Cultural%20Chronology. The world’s average land and sea temperatures have increased: IPCC. 2014. Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 40. Accessed Sept. 8, 2015, at http://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_ SYR_FINAL_full.pdf More than 90 percent of that global burden of increased heat: Ibid. This thermal expansion is the most obvious cause of sea level rise: A. Parris, P. Bromirski, V. Burkett, D. Cayan, M. Culver, J. Hall, R. Horton, K. Knuuti, R. Moss, J. Obeysekera, A. Sallenger, and J. Weiss. 2012. Global Sea-Level Rise Scenarios for the U.S. National Climate Assessment. NOAA Tech Memo OAR CPO-1, 2. Accessed Sept. 19, 2015, at http://www.researchgate.net/publication/256497517. Scientists now think the melting of the polar ice caps—a process now well under way: Ibid. Thermal expansion and the melting of the polar ice caps can be slowed: Author interview with Ben Kirtman, July 8, 2015; IPCC 2014, Synthesis Report, 62, 65–66, 74, 77–78. About 1.8 million years ago, the peninsula: University of Florida IFAS Extension. Aug. 2014. Sustainable Floridians Module: Climate Change and Sea Level Rise, 24. Most of South Florida formed underwater: John Edward Hoffmeister. 1974. Land from the Sea: The Geologic Story of South Florida (Miami: University of Miami Press), 45–47. Today’s sea level rise is different than anything in Florida’s past: Author interviews with geologists Andrea Dutton, July 17, 2015, and Peter Adams and John Jaeger, July 23, 2017. In 1938 an English amateur meteorologist put forward: H. Le Treut, R. Somerville, U. Cubasch, Y. Ding, C. Mauritzen, A. Mokssit, T. Peterson, and M. Prather. 2007. “Historical Overview of Climate Change.” In Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 105. Accessed Sept. 14, 2015, at https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/ wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter1.pdf. Callendar’s 1938 paper is available Notes to Pages 17–19 · 99

at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49706427503/ abstract. A graph superimposing the Englishman’s records on modern reconstructions: Leo Hickman. 2013. “How the Burning of Fossil Fuels Was Linked to a Warming World in 1938.” Guardian, Apr. 22, 2013. Accessed Sept. 16, 2015, at http:// www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2013/apr/22/ guy-callendar-climate-fossil-fuels. By the 1980s the trend Callendar observed was more obvious: American Institute of Physics. Feb. 2014. The Discovery of Global Warming: The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect. Accessed Sept. 14, 2015, at https://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm. In 1990 the IPCC, the UN’s panel: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 1990. Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment, ed. J. T. Houghton, G. J. Jenkins, and J. J. Ephraums (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xii. Accessed Sept. 10, 2015, at https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_full_ report.pdf. But since then, science has made advances: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. 2015. Satellite Data. Accessed Sept. 17, 2015, at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/satellite-data; IPCC 2014, Synthesis Report, 56. “Human influence has been detected”: IPCC 2014, Synthesis Report, 37, 47. Meanwhile levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” 3. In March 2015, the global monthly average for carbon dioxide: Seth Borenstein. 2015. “Carbon Dioxide Increasing at Record Pace around the World.” Seattle Times, May 6, 2015. Accessed Sept. 8, 2015, at http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ carbon-dioxide-levels-rising-at-record-pace-around-the-world/. The IPCC has said there is a chance humankind can limit: IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” 9–11. At a historic climate change conference in Paris: Coral Davenport, Justin Gillis, Sewell Chan and Melissa Eddy, “Inside the Paris Climate Deal,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 2015. Accessed Jan. 8, 2015 at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/12/world/paris- climate-change-deal-explainer.html?_r=0 Its latest summary of sea level rise came out in December 2012: Parris et al. 2012. 100 · Notes to Pages 19–22

At Florida International University, geographic information systems expert: Peter Harlem and John F. Meeder. 2008. “Sea Level Rise in Miami- Dade County Florida: Implications for Management of Coastal Wetlands and the Everglades.” Florida International University Sea Level Rise Collection, paper 4, accessed Sept. 8, 2015, at http:// digitalcommons.fiu.edu/sea_level_rise/4; Peter Harlem. 2008. “Sea Level Rise Map Projections.” Ibid., paper 2. Accessed Sept. 8, 2015, at http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/sea_level_rise/2. The oldest and simplest way to track sea level rise: Gary T. Mitchum. 2011. Sea Level Changes in the Southeastern United States Past, Present, and Future, 7. Florida Climate Institute and Southeast Climate Consortium. Florida’s oldest tide gauge record, in Key West: UF/IFAS. Aug. 2014. Climate Change and Sea Level Rise, 24. These records show worldwide sea levels: Mitchum 2011, 7; IPCC 2014, Synthesis Report, 42. Today altimeters aboard U.S. and European satellites: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. 2015. “Satellite Data.” Accessed Sept. 17, 2015, at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ data-access/satellite-data. In 2011 the Florida Climate Institute . . . commissioned Gary T. Mitchum: Mitchum 2011, 5–7. Mitchum looked at ten recent years’ worth: Mitchum 2011, 8–10, 13. But Mitchum and many other researchers warn: IPCC 2014, Synthesis Report, 62; Melillo et al. 2014, 3; Mitchum 2011, 12–13; Parris et al. 2012, 12, 13. The Gulf Stream is the warm surface portion: Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. “What Is the Gulf Stream?” Accessed Sept. 17, 2015, at http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/en/kommunikation/ fragen-zu-klima-faq/what-is-the-gulf-stream. A study published in March 2015 in Nature Climate Change: Stefan Rahmstorf, Jason E. Box, Georg Feulner, Michael E. Mann, Alexander Robinson, Scott Rutherford, and Erik J. Schaffernicht. 2015. “Exceptional Twentieth-Century Slowdown in Atlantic Ocean Overturning Circulation.” Nature Climate Change 5 (March): 475–80. Accessed Sept. 17, 2015, at http://www.nature.com/nclimate/ journal/v5/n5/full/nclimate2554.html. The study’s widely respected lead author: Stefan Rahmstorf. March 23, 2015. “What’s Going On in the North Atlantic.” RealClimate, accessed Sept. 17, 2015, at http://www.realclimate.org/index. php/archives/2015/03/whats-going-on-in-the-north-atlantic/. Notes to Pages 22–25 · 101

“The southeastern U.S. is critically affected”: Interview with Kirtman. Wrestling with questions like these, in 2011 the Florida Climate Institute: Carolyn Cox and Muriel Hannion, Florida Climate Institute. 2011. Florida’s Climate Experts Discuss Impacts of Climate Change on Florida in a Two-Day Event. Accessed Sept. 8, 2015, at https:// floridaclimateinstitute.org/events/2011-annual-event/home. The Florida Climate Institute is the brainchild of James Jones: Interview with Jones. The institute, headquartered in Gainesville: Author interview with Jack Payne, University of Florida senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources, July 27, 2015. Florida Climate Institute. “Who We Are.” Accessed June 24, 2015, at https:// floridaclimateinstitute.org/about. In 2011, supported by a $400,000 state grant, the institute produced: Florida Climate Institute. 2011. “New White Papers on Climate Released.” Accessed June 24, 2015, at https:// floridaclimateinstitute.org/resources/news-archive/262-new- white-papers-on-climate-released. Interview with Jones. In one of those papers, Obeysekera and . . . Misra: V. Misra and J. Obeysekera. 2011. “The Inadequacies of IPCC AR4 Models to Project Climate over Florida.” In V. Misra et al. 2011, 28–29. Accessed June 24, 2015 at http://floridaclimate.org/whitepapers/. Also crucial to Florida's weather is the rhythmic warming and cooling: Obeysekera et al. 2011, 12. In a keynote speech to the Florida Climate Institute's: Obeysekera, keynote address. The group looked at daily high and low: Obeysekera et al., 2011, 23, 39–48. That was no surprise, since the warming effects: V. Misra. “Anthropogenic Influences on Florida’s Climate.” In Misra et al. 2011, 1. The study did find an increase in the number of “dog days”: Jayantha Obeysekera and Jennifer Barnes. 2013. “Progress towards the Development of Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Scenarios for South Florida.” Presentation to the South Florida Water, Sustainability and Climate Project, Key Largo, March 3, 2013, slide 4. Accessed Sept. 10, 2015, at http://sfwsc.fiu.edu/Presentations. html. Rainfall increased slightly from 1950 onward: Obeysekera et al. 2011, 36–39. The district team found the global models did a poor job: Ibid., 60. 102 · Notes to Pages 25–29

From its results the researchers projected: Ibid., 79, 90–91. Using tide data from the early twentieth century through 2008: Park et al. 2011, 112–17. In 2009, officials from Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade: Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact. 2014. “About the Compact.” Accessed July 25, 2015, at http://www. southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/who-we-are/. Compact members realized the four counties need: Interview with Obeysekera. Eventually the group decided to use: Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact Technical Ad Hoc Work Group. April 2011. A Unified Sea Level Projection for Southeast Florida: A Document Prepared for the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact Steering Committee, 2. Accessed June 19, 2015, at https://www.broward. org/NaturalResources/ClimateChange/Documents/SE%20FL%20 Sea%20Level%20Rise%20White%20Paper%20April%202011%20 ADA%20FINAL.pdf. The science committee is working on revised estimates: Interview with Obeysekera. Planners from the compact’s four counties looked at what would happen: Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact Inundation Mapping and Vulnerability Assessment Work Group. Aug. 2012. Analysis of the Vulnerability of Southeast Florida to Sea Level Rise. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http:// www.southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org//wp-content/ uploads/2014/09/vulnerability-assessment.pdf. LiDAR, which stands for “light detection and ranging”: Ibid., B-3. Southeast Florida has a natural north-to-south slope: Ibid., vii. Two-thirds of mainland Monroe County and the Keys: Ibid., 4. In Miami-Dade, one foot of sea level rise would submerge: Ibid., 48. One foot of sea level rise would affect Port Everglades: Ibid., 64. It’s important to realize that sea level rise will not stop: Interview with Kirtman. For Miami-Dade and South Broward, Zhang found: Keqi Zhang. 2011. “Analysis of Non-linear Inundation from Sea-Level Rise Using LIDAR Data: A Case Study for South Florida.” Climatic Change 106 (4): 537. Accessed Sept. 19, 2015, at http://www.researchgate. net/publication/227252825_Analysis_of_non-linear_inundation_ for_sea-level_rise_using_LIDAR_data_A_case_study_for_South_ Florida. In the Keys the tipping points are much lower: Keqi Zhang, John Dittmar, Notes to Pages 29–33 · 103

Michael Ross, and Chris Bergh. 2011. “Assessment of Sea Level Rise Impacts on Human Population and Real Property in the Florida Keys.” Climatic Change 107: 137–41. Obeysekera has visited classrooms: Interview with Obeysekera. Veteran Florida scientists say some state agencies helped pay: Interviews with Jones, Noss, and Leonard Berry, Jan. 7, 2016. The Southeast Florida Compact has turned to NOAA and: Interview with Obeysekera.

Field Notes: On the Beach There used to be a grandstand near a sand dune on the beach: NASA. “The Press Site at KSC,” 4. Accessed Sept. 21, 2015, at http://www.nasa. gov/centers/kennedy/pdf/146683main_PressSite06.pdf. A stretch of beach that once was stable: Michael Carlowicz. Aug. 26, 2015. Sea Level Rise Hits Home at NASA: Watching Waters Rise Right outside the Front Door. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Accessed Sept. 21, 2015, at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/ features/201508_risingseas/. Two University of Florida geologists who spent five years: Author interview with Peter Adams and John Jaeger, July 23, 2015. On Cape Canaveral, Adams and . . . John Jaeger: Dr. John Jaeger, Dr. Peter N. Adams, Richard MacKenzie III, Shaun Kline, Bianca Mailbauer, Timothy Kirchner, Alia Lesnek, Erin Harris-Parks, and Jessica Lovering. 2011.Monitoring Shoreline and Beach Morphologic Change at Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida, Annual Report Phase 2, May 2009–May 2011, 19. Steered by natural variations in elevation: Interview with Adams and Jaeger. Adams and Jaeger are among the authors of a separate study: Jennifer M. Johnson, Laura J. Moore, Kenneth Ells, A. Brad Murray, Peter N. Adams, Richard A. MacKenzie III, and John M. Jaeger. 2014. “Recent Shifts in Coastline Change and Shoreline Stabilization Linked to Storm Climate Change.” In Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 40 (5). Three major storms in the past ten years: Steve Orlando. Dec. 15, 2014. “Climate Change Already Showing Effects at Kennedy Space Center.” UF News, University of Florida. Accessed July 23, 2015, at http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2014/12/climate-change-already- showing-effects-at-kennedy-space-center.html. Lesser storms regularly overwash an abandoned railroad line: Interview with Adams and Jaeger. 104 · Notes to Pages 35–40

At the Kennedy Space Center, the biggest and most famous: Carlowicz 2015.

Chapter 3. Come Rain or Come Shine Beyond the manatee viewing platform: Tampa Bay Water, Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination Plant. Accessed Sept. 9, 2015, at http:// www.tampabaywater.org/documents/fact-sheets/desal-fact-sheet. pdf. Water treated this way costs about $4 for each 1,000 gallons: Author interview with Alison Adams, Sept. 25, 2015. But more than 400 water treatment plants: Florida Department of Environmental Protection. 2014. Annual Report on Regional Water Supply Planning, 6. Accessed Sept. 25, 2015, at http://www.dep. state.fl.us/water/waterpolicy/docs/2014_annual_rwsp.pdf. Already this cycle is more unpredictable than it was a generation ago: Interview with Adams; author interview with Wendy Graham, July 23, 2015. It takes more than 6 billion gallons of water: Florida Department of Environmental Protection, 2014, 5. “Traditional sources of fresh groundwater”: Ibid., 2. The next generation of water systems: Ibid., 6. Florida’s rivers and lakes, bubbling springs, and deep pools: Interview with Graham. “When I was a kid, we used to say you could set your watch”: Interview with Adams. The utility is the largest water wholesaler in the Southeast: Tirusew Asefa, Alison Adams, and Ivana Kajtezovic-Blankenship. 2014. “A Tale of Integrated Regional Water Supply Planning: Meshing Socio- economic Policy, Governance, and Sustainability Desires Together. Journal of Hydrology 519: 2632. Tampa Bay Water is the offspring of a drought and a water war: Ibid., 2632–33. The utility’s 28 rain gauges have confirmed Adams’ intuition: Interview with Adams. “The prevalence of extreme single-day precipitation events”: United States Environmental Protection Agency. Sept. 22, 2015. “Climate Change Indicators in the United States.” Accessed Sept. 25, 2015, at http:// www3.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/weather- climate/heavy-precip.html. Or will a hotter Florida have to deal with water shortages: L. M. Carter, J. W. Jones, L. Berry, V. Burkett, J. F. Murley, J. Obeysekera, P. J. Notes to Pages 40–45 · 105

Schramm, and D. Wear. 2014. “Southeast and the Caribbean.” In Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment, ed. J. M. Melillo, Terese (T.C.) Richmond, and G. W. Yohe, U.S. Global Change Research Program, 405. Accessed Sept. 25, 2015, at http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/downloads. Graham heads a multi-year project funded by NOAA and Tampa Bay Water: Interview with Graham. Florida’s summer rains are almost always ocean-born: Cynthia Barnett. 2015. Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (New York: Crown), 227; author interview with Vasubandhu Misra, July 9, 2015. But the full picture is more complex: Interview with Misra. Misra, an associate professor of meteorology: Vasubandhu Misra and S. M. DiNapoli. 2012. “Understanding Wet Season Variations over Florida.” Climate Dynamics 42(3–4): 701–14. Accessed Sept. 9, 2015 at http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=coaps_pubs&sei- redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearc h%3Fclient%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26q%3Dunderstanding% 2Bwet%2Bseason%2Bvariations%2Bover%2Bflorida%26ie%3D UTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8#search=%22understanding%20wet%20 season%20variations%20over%20florida%22. . . . farmers who until recently consumed the lion’s share: Florida Department of Environmental Protection 2014, 5. To prevent a recurrence of the past environmental damage: Asefa et al. 2014, 2633. The utility has pumps, pipes, and reservoirs designed to capture: Interview with Adams. Researchers trying to predict the coming decade’s climate: Interview with Graham. Working with 10 global climate models that break the continent into cells: Wendy Graham. Oct. 2013. Presentation to the Tampa Bay Water Board, 7. There are two main techniques for downscaling global climate models: Interview with Graham. At FSU, Misra and his colleagues developed: V. Misra, S. M. DiNapoli, and S. Bastola. 2013. “Dynamic Downscaling of the Twentieth- Century Reanalysis over the Southeastern United States.” Regional Environmental Change 13 (Suppl 1): S15–S23. Accessed Sept. 9, 2015, at http://coaps.fsu.edu/~vmisra/dynamic20th.pdf. Graham and the Water Institute group: Graham Oct. 2013, 8. The models show Tampa Bay’s rainfall may decrease: Ibid., 17. 106 · Notes to Pages 45–50

That is about the same as today’s real-world swing: Interview with Adams. The Water Institute researchers are well into the next phase: Interview with Graham.

Lab Notes: Hurricane Lore Misra and Satish Bastola looked at 28 watersheds: Vasubandhu Misra and Satish Bastola. May 14, 2015. “Reconciling Droughts and Landfalling Tropical Cyclones in the Southeastern United States.” Climate Dynamics, published online. Accessed Sept. 9, 2015, at https://coaps.fsu.edu/~vmisra/hurricane-drought.pdf. “Historically it’s very rare for a hurricane to make landfall”: Interview with Misra. In 2014 the climate experts at the Intergovernmental Panel: IPCC 2014, Synthesis Report, 2014, 53.

Chapter 4. Intelligent Tinkering On a balmy day in early June: Author interviews with Jaret C. Daniels, June 4 and 6, 2015. . . . a creature so elegant it has graced a U.S. postage stamp: U.S. Stamp Gallery: Schaus swallowtail butterfly, U.S. Postal Service, accessed Sept. 8, 2015 at http://usstampgallery.com/view.php?id=c3e9d985 2f61d7d5faa50d5ed0bdc4bbe1770c45. . . . and so rare that in 2012 a thorough search turned up only four: Jaret C. Daniels. 2015. Conservation of Schaus’ Swallowtail (Heraclides aristodemus ponceanus) in South Florida: Summary and Plans for 2015. PowerPoint presentation to Imperiled Butterflies of Florida Working Group. This resilient creature has made it through two of the worst hurricanes: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 1999. “Schaus Swallowtail Butterfly, Heraclides aristodemus ponceanus.” In Multi-species Recovery Plan for South Florida, 1999, Atlanta, 4-751. Accessed Aug. 27, 2015 at http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/schaus_ swallowtail_recovery_plan_1999_revised.pdf. And there’s another peril: if rainfall patterns change: Author interview with Jaret C. Daniels, April 24, 2015. Other iconic Florida species are in a similar predicament: Author interview with Reed F. Noss, July 31, 2015; Frank Mazotti, e-mail to author, June 23, 2015; Joshua Steven Reece, Reed F. Noss, Jon Oettling, Tom Hoctor, and Michael Volk. 2013. A Vulnerability Assessment of 300 Species in Florida: Threats from Sea Level Rise, Land Use, and Climate Notes to Pages 51–55 · 107

Change, Plos One 8 (11): e80658. doi:10.1371./journal.pone.0080658. Published online Nov. 19, 2013. “If the biota, in the course of aeons”: Aldo Leopold. 1966. A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Oxford University Press). Most of the world’s butterflies spend their lives: Interview with Daniels, April 24, 2015. Here mahogany and gumbo limbo grow: Roger L. Hammer. 2004. Florida Keys Wildflowers: A Field Guide to Wildflowers, Trees, Vines, and Shrubs of the Florida Keys. (Guilford, Conn. : Globe Pequot Press), 7. First described in 1911 by William Schaus Jr.: Mathilde Carpenter. 1942. “William Schaus.” Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington 44 (9): Accessed online Aug. 27, 2015 at http:// archive.org/stream/cbarchive_100268_williamschaus1884/ williamschaus1884_djvu.txt and USFWS p. 4-744. Its closest kin are in the Bahamas: Jaret C. Daniels, Schaus Swallowtail, Heraclides aristodemus ponceanus (Schaus) (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Papilionidae). UF IFAS Extension EENY-387. Accessed Aug. 27, 2015, at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/IN/IN69800.pdf. Its early life stages, egg and larva or caterpillar, last about 45 days: Interview with Daniels, June 4, 2015. Within hours the female is ready to lay her eggs: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 1999, 4-752. The butterfly’s survival depends on the first few . . . rains: Interview with Daniels, April 24, 2015. In July 1935, an amateur entomologist: F. M. Grimshawe. 1940. “Place of Sorrow: The World’s Rarest Butterfly and Matecumbe Key.”Nature Magazine 33:565–67, 611. In USFWS 1999, 4-751. Less than two months later, the Labor Day Hurricane: Eric S. Blake, Jerry D. Jarrell, Max Mayfield, and Edward N. Rappoport. The Most Intense Hurricanes in the United States 1851–2004, National Hurricane Center, accessed Aug. 28, 2015, at http://www.nhc. noaa.gov:pastint.shtml; Chris Dolce and Nick Witgen. Top Five Most Intense U.S. Hurricanes. Weather Central, accessed online Aug. 28, 2015, at http://www.weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/ five-most-intense-hurricanes-20120912—/6. Seeking a sign of hope: Grimshawe 1940. Scientists don’t know exactly why, but they suspect: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 1999, 4-751. In 1976 the species was listed as threatened with extinction: Ibid., 4-750. 108 · Notes to Pages 56–61

Concerned that all of the world’s Schaus’ swallowtails: Interview with Daniels, April 24, 2015. In the 1990s, a McGuire center scientist: Ibid. Daniels and colleagues have used DNA techniques: Interview with Daniels, June 4, 2015; Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Miami blue butterfly, Cyclargus thomasi bethunebakeri. Accessed Sept. 6, 2015, at http://myfwc.com/media/2211670/ Miami-Blue-Butterfly.pdf. Experts from several agencies are now rethinking a conservation strategy: Author interviews with Jaret C. Daniels and Mary Truglio, biologist, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, June 4, 2015; Travis Longcore. 2013. Assessment of Recovery Strategies for Miami Blue Butterfly. The Urban Wildlands Group. Accessed Sept. 6, 2015, at http://www.urbanwildlands.org/Resources/2013 MiamiBlueRecoveryStrategy.pdf. That is fortunate, because in the late 1990s: Interview with Daniels, June 4, 2015. The next year, 32 Schaus’ swallowtails emerged: Daniels 2015, 6. The team ended up with 70 pupae: Ibid., 15. “The Keys are ground zero”: Author interview with Noss, July 31, 2015; Reed F. Noss. 2011. “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Florida’s Unenviable Position with Respect to Sea Level Rise.” Climatic Change 107 (1–2): 16. Ironically, Florida’s geologic history of rising and falling seas: Monroe County Extension Office. Getting to Know the Keys. UF/IFAS extension. Accessed July 20, 2015, at http://monroe.ifas.ufl.edu/ lawn/lawn_keysguide_sec1.shtml. Living things reached the islands: Michael S. Ross, Joseph J. O’Brien, and Laura J. Flynn. 1992. “Ecological Site Classification of Florida Keys Terrestrial Habitats.” Biotropica 24 (4): 488–502. One of the endemic species at gravest risk: Joshua S. Reece and Reed F. Noss. 2014. “Prioritizing Species by Conservation Value and Vulnerability: A New Index Applied to Species Threatened by Sea- Level Rise and Other Risks in Florida.” Natural Areas Journal 34 (1): 31–45, 36. Descended from the white-tailed deer: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. National Key Deer Refuge. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://www. fws.gov/southeast/pubs/facts/nkdcon.pdf; Scott Moses. 2015. “Height measurement in children.” Family Practice Notebook, July. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://www.fpnotebook.com/endo/ exam/hghtmsrmntinchldrn.htm; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Notes to Pages 62–65 · 109

Odocoileus virginianus clavium in Multispecies Recovery Plan for South Florida, 1999, accessed online Sept. 4, 2015 at http://www.fws.gov/ verobeach/MSRPPDFs/KeyDeer.pdf. Among the refuge’s other inhabitants: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 1999. “Lower Keys Rabbit, Sylvilagus palustris hefneri.” In Multispecies Recovery Plan for South Florida 1999. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://www.fws.gov/verobeach/MSRPPDFs/LowerKeysRabbit. pdf. The Keys’ native deer and native rabbit: Reece et al. 2013, 4; interview with Noss. Some plants and animals may be able to keep up: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Climate Change Impacts on Florida’s Fish and Wildlife. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://myfwc.com/ conservation/special-initiatives/climate-change/impacts/. As they thought about the contrast between the species: Interview with Noss. . . . or listed in a statewide database of rarities: Florida Natural Areas Inventory. About Florida Natural Areas Inventory. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://www.fnai.org/about.cfm. What species is likely to be Florida’s first loss?: Reece et al. 2013, 6. . . . and the mangrove terrapin, which wears an elegant diamond-patterned shell: Florida Natural Areas Inventory. 2001. Field guide to the rare animals of Florida. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://www.fnai.org/ FieldGuide/pdf/Malaclemys_terrapin.pdf; Of the 40 plants and animals the researchers ranked: Reece et al. 2013, 9. Florida’s Gulf and Atlantic coasts are home: Brittany L. Bird, Lyn C. Branch, and Mark E. Hostetler. Beach Mice. UF/IFAS Extension EDIS publication #WEC 165. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://edis. ifas.ufl.edu/uw173. Betsy Von Holle, an associate professor of biology: Betsy Von Holle, John F. Weishampel, Jennifer Irish, Annette Spivy, and Scott C. Hagen. How will Future Sea Level Rise Affect Sea Turtle, Shorebird, Seabird, and Beach Mouse Nesting Habitats within the South Atlantic Bight? 2015. Presented at the Biodiversity: Effects of Global Change symposium, Aug. 14, 2015, Ecological Society of America annual meeting, Baltimore. But with more than 400 known endemic plants: Eleanor Noss Whitney, D. Bruce Means, and Anne Rudloe. 2004. Priceless Florida: Natural Ecosystems and Native Species (Sarasota: Pineapple Press), 16. Florida has seven hot spots where endemic and rare plants are clustered: Knight et al. 2011. “Atlas of Florida’s Heritage.” In Reed F. Noss, 110 · Notes to Pages 65–68

Vulnerabilities of Species and Natural Communities in Florida to Sea- Level Rise, and What We Can Do About It. Presentation to the Florida Native Plant Society, July 2015. The two inland hotspots of Florida endemics are the Lake Wales Ridge and the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines. The five coastal hot spots are the Gulf beaches and marshes of the western Panhandle; the Apalachicola Lowlands along Apalachicola Bay; the Atlantic Coastal Ridge; the Keys; and the Miami Rock Ridge, a limestone ridge running from northeast Miami-Dade County deep into Everglades National Park. Some natural communities will begin to disappear: Author interview with Michael S. Ross, Aug. 13, 2015. In their shelter grow more than 225 native plants: Miami-Dade County Regulatory and Economic Resources. Pine Rocklands. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://www.miamidade.gov/environment/pine- rocklands.asp. After 98 percent of South Florida’s pine rocklands: Ibid. About the time that Jack Putz and his colleagues: Michael S. Ross and Joseph J. O’Brien. 1994. “Sea-Level Rise and the Reduction in Pine Forests in the Florida Keys.” Ecological Applications 4 (1): 144–56. Roll the clock forward more than a decade: Michael S. Ross, Joseph J. O’Brien, R. Glenn Ford, Keqi Zhang, and Anne Morkill. 2009. “Disturbance and the Rising Tide: The Challenge of Biodiversity Management on Low-Island Ecosystems.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 7 (9): 471–78. In autumn 2006 Ross, now an associate professor: Ibid. The lesson, Ross concluded, was that . . . sea level rise: Ibid., 5. The tropical hardwood trees that shelter the Schaus’ swallowtail: Interview with Ross, Aug. 13, 2015. On Elliott Key, the tropical trees grow mostly on a slim ridge: H. Klein. 1970. Preliminary Evaluation of Availability of Potable Water on Elliott Key, Dade County, Florida. U.S. Dept. of the Interior Geological Survey Water Resources Division Open-File Report 70010. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015, at http://sofia.usgs.gov/publications/ ofr/70-010/ofr-70010.pdf. Consider the Southeast Florida Climate Compact’s projections: Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact Inundation Mapping and Vulnerability Assessment Working Group, 2012, 4, 15, and 16. Ross, Noss, and other ecologists: Joyce Maschinski, Michael S. Ross, Hong Liu, Joe O’Brien, Eric J. von Wettberg, and Kristin E. Haskins. 2011. “Sinking Ships: Conservation Options for Endemic Taxa Notes to Pages 69–74 · 111

Threatened by Sea Level Rise.” Climatic Change 107(1–2): 154–64; Ross et al. 2009, 5–7; Noss 2011, 12–13; Reece et al. 2014, 44–45. “Our conservation challenge in the face of sea level rise”: Maschinski et al. 2011, 163–64.

Chapter 5. The Way Forward But when Florida, Georgia, and Alabama farmers began meeting: Wendy- Lin Bartels, Carrie A. Furman, David C. Diehl, Fred S. Royce, Daniel R. Dourte, Brenda V. Ortiz, David F. Zierden, Tracy A. Irani, Clyde W. Fraisse, and James W. Jones. 2012. “Warming Up to Climate Change: A Participatory Approach to Engaging with Agricultural Stakeholders in the Southeast U.S., Regional Environmental Change,” 4. Published online. More than half believed climate change is already happening: Ibid., 6. They are right on both counts, said James Jones: Interview with Jones. In the workshops farmers learn techniques for coping: Bartels et al. 2012, 5, 7–9. Bartels’s ongoing work is part of a research strategy: Ibid., 9–10. In a three-year study marrying natural and social sciences: Kathryn Frank, Michael Volk, and Dawn Jourdan. 2015. Planning for Sea Level Rise in the Matanzas Basin: Opportunities for Adaptation, 18–25. University of Florida. Accessed Aug. 16, 2015, at https://planningmatanzas. files.wordpress.com/2012/06/planning-for-sea-level-rise-in-the- matanzas-basin1.pdf. “Hope is the key to mobilizing”: Kathryn Frank, e-mail to author, Sept. 30, 2015. On a website where all the group’s participants can blog: Southeast Innovative Farm Team, http://www.siftag.org. “Florida farmers have already had to be nimble and adaptable”: Interview with Jones. Since 1985, sophisticated computer models: J. W. Jones, G. Hoogenboom, C. H. Porter, K. J. Boote, W. D. Batchelor, L. A. Hunt, P. W. Wilkens, U. Singh, A. J. Gijsman, and J. T. Ritchie. 2003. “The DSSAT Cropping System Model.” European Journal of Agronomy 18: 235. Agriculture is Florida’s second-largest industry after tourism: Florida Department of Agriculture. 2013. Florida Agriculture by the Numbers, 2, 3. Accessed Oct. 2, 2015, at http://www.freshfromflorida.com/ content/download/36315/838961/AgByTheNumbers.pdf. With California enduring a drought that is affecting U.S. food prices: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. 2015. California Drought: Food Prices and Consumers. Accessed 112 · Notes to Pages 74–77

Oct. 2, 2015, at http://www.freshfromflorida.com/content/ download/36315/838961/AgByTheNumbers.pdf. But the lack of a dormant season or winter chilling is problematic: J. Hatfield, G. Takle, R. Grotjahn, P. Holden, R. C. Izaurralde, T. Mader, E. Marshall, and D. Liverman. 2014. “Agriculture.” In Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment, ed. J. M. Melillo, Terese (T.C.) Richmond, and G. W. Yohe, 156–57. U.S. Global Change Research Program. Accessed Oct. 2, 2015, at http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/ sectors/agriculture. The National Climate Assessment’s farming experts predict that Florida: Ibid., 155, 152. In a 2015 study, University of Florida researcher Davide Cammarano: Davide Cammarano, David Zierden, Lydia Stefanova, Senthold Asseng, James J. O’Brien, and James W. Jones. 2015. “Using Historical Climate Observations to Understand Future Crop Yield Impacts in the Southeastern U.S.” Climatic Change, published online Sept. 4, 2015. Abstract accessed at http://link.springer.com/ article/10.1007/s10584-015-1497-9#page-1. And uncertainty about too much or too little rainfall: Daniel R. Dourte, Clyde W. Fraisse, and Wendy-Lin Bartels. 2015, “Exploring Changes in Rainfall Intensity and Seasonal Variability in the Southeastern U.S.: Stakeholder Engagement, Observations, and Adaptation. Climate Risk Management 7: 12–13. There are solutions to these problems hidden in plants’ genes: Interview with Jones. To find out, Jones has been working with . . . Eduardo Vallejos: Ibid.; C. E. Vallejos. 2015. “Overview of NSF Project.” Talk, Interdisciplinary Workshop on Merging Crop Modeling and Genetics, Gainesville, July 19. As a result, Jones said, they are close to the point: Interview with Jones “We believe this can be done,” Jones told a group: James W. Jones. 2015. “CM-1 Dynamic Crop Models.” Talk, Interdisciplinary Workshop on Merging Crop Modeling and Genetics, Gainesville, July 19. For example, the National Climate Assessment predicts that 37,500 acres: L. M. Carter et al. 2014, 402. Even then, farmers may be able to adapt, Jones said: Interview with Jones But many of the farmers have begun using cover crops: Wendy-Lin Bartels, e-mail to author, Oct. 1, 2015. As a child, Patrick Hamilton spent barefoot summers: Author interview with Patrick Hamilton, Oct. 1, 2015. Notes to Pages 78–82 · 113

Tarpon jump and dolphins roll in its waters: Denis W. Frazel. 2009. Site Profile of the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (Ponte Vedra, Florida), 57–68. With North America’s oldest city and a handful of beach towns: Author interview with Kathryn Frank, July 30, 2015. Joining him on the committee were 13 other residents: Frank et al. 2015, 57. The research team’s basic findings: Ibid., 21-25. . Led by Kathryn Frank: Interview with Frank. The study was born out of conversations between Frank and Michael Shirley: Ibid.; author interview with Michael Shirley, Oct. 1, 2015. Most of the land west of the reserve is farmland or timberland: Frank et al. 2015, 222, 224, 225. The reserve overlaps Flagler and St. Johns Counties: Paul Zwick and Max Deledda. June 2015. “Appendix E: Matanzas Future Development Scenarios.” In Frank et al. 2015. Scientists mapped the effects of sea level rise: Anna Cathey Linhoss, Greg Kiker and Kathryn Frank. June 2015. “Appendix C: Application of the Sea Level Affecting Marshes (SLAMM) Model in the Matanzas Basin.” Results, Table 3. In Frank et al. 2015. But St. Augustine’s historic district, which already endures king tide floods: Ibid., Results, Table 4. . The researchers added in the effects of projected development: Frank et al. 2015. 191. University of Florida biologist Tom Hoctor assessed the impacts: Tom Hoctor, Michael Volk, and Mingjian Zhu. 2015. “Appendix D: Conservation Impacts and Priorities in the Matanzas Basin,” part B. In Frank et al. 2015. Many species could regain some lost habitat: Ibid. There were some areas where future wildlife habitat: Frank et al. 2015. 41. At public meetings attended by about 325 people: Ibid., 65. “We must contemplate our legacy,” said research team member Dawn Jourdan: “Planning for Sea Level Rise in the Matanzas Basin: A Closer Look at Community, Environment, and Legacy.” June 3, 2013. Slides 38 and 39. Accessed Oct. 1, 2015, at https:// planningmatanzas.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/matanzas-sea- level-rise-june-4-2013-corrected-low-res.pdf; Kathryn Frank, e-mail to author, Oct. 7, 2015. They found residents especially valued the area’s salt marshes: Frank et al. 2015, 106. With those guideposts, members of the research team: Ibid., 226–37. Among other ideas they outlined were the elevation: Ibid. 256-57; Thomas 114 · Notes to Pages 82–86

Ruppert. June 2015. “Appendix H1: Integrated Framework Adaptation and Toolkit,” 9–16. In Frank et al. 2015. In a separate 2015 survey, research team member Thomas Ruppert: Thomas Ruppert and Alexander Stewart. April 2015. Summary and Commentary on Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Language in Florida’s Local Government Comprehensive Plans, 5–7. The town of Satellite Beach, population 23,000, was the first: Author interview with Thomas Ruppert, July 21, 2015; author interview with Courtney Barker, city manager, Satellite Beach, Sept. 29, 2015. Northeast Florida counties and towns have not incorporated: Ruppert and Stewart April 2015, 1–2. But in November 2013, Margo Moehring: Margo Moehring. 2013. Summary and Regional Action Plan: A Report of the Emergency Preparedness Committee on Sea Level Rise, Nov. 2013. Accessed Oct. 1, 2015, at http://www.nefrc.org/pdfs/Regional%20Action%20Plan. pdf; Margo Moehring, e-mail to author, Oct. 1, 2015. In December 2014 the Northeast Florida Regional Council brought together business leaders: Margo Moehring. “P2R2, Public-Private Regional Resiliency.” Accessed Oct. 1, 2015, at http://www.rcinef.org/P2R2. html. “People in this area have not been paying attention”: Interview with Hamilton. The researchers have provided all of their work to local governments: Interview with Frank.

Field Notes: Of Islands and Ice Before Andrea Dutton was a geologist: Author interview with Andrea Dutton, July 17, 2015. Melting glaciers and expanding seas have contributed most: Ibid.; interview with Kirtman. In her latest study, published in July 2015 in Science: A. Dutton, A. E. Carlson, A. J. Long, G. A. Milne, P. U. Clark, R. DeConto, B. P. Horton, S. Rahmstorf, and M. E. Raymo. July 2015. “Sea-Level Rise Due to Polar Ice-Sheet Mass Loss during Past Warm Periods.” Science 349 (6244): aaa4019-1. But Dutton’s fieldwork in the Seychelles suggests most of the increase: Andrea Dutton, Jody M. Webster, Dan Zwartz, and Kurt Lambeck. 2015. “Tropical Tales of Polar Ice: Evidence of Last Interglacial Polar Ice Sheet Retreat Recorded by Fossil Reefs of the Granitic Seychelles Islands.” Quaternary Science Reviews 107: 182, 193. Notes to Pages 86–88 · 115

That warming cycle, which took place between 120,000 and 130,000 years ago: Dutton et al., July 2015, aaa4019-5. Dutton chose the Seychelles because the islands’ elevation: Interview with Dutton. The team sampled many ancient corals that were still intact: Dutton et al. 2015, 184. The samples were purified in Dutton’s Gainesville clean lab: Interview with Dutton. Next, a mass spectrometer scanned each sample for variants of uranium: Ibid.; Dutton et al. 2015, 184, 187. They found that seas had risen by about 20 feet: Ibid., 182, 189, 193. The researchers found thermal expansion of the oceans: Dutton et al. 2015, 194. After those results were published in 2015: Dutton et al. 2015, aaa4019- 1, aaa4019-2; PALeo constraints on SEA level rise 2 (PALSEA2) Working Group. July 7, 2015. “Present Temperature Targets May Commit Earth to at Least 6 Metres Sea Level Rise. Accessed Oct. 1, 2015, at http://www.pages-igbp.org/download/docs/working_ groups/palsea/2015-07-07-Press-release-PALSEA-Science-paper. pdf. In all three time periods, they found, temperatures: Dutton et al. July 2015, aaa4019-1, aaa4091-2. Only the oldest time period they studied: Ibid. In spring 2016 Dutton plans a new project: Interview with Dutton. Copyright 2016 by The University of Florida Board of Trustees All rights reserved Produced in the United States of America

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Sea levels are rising around the globe, and in Florida—with its 1,200 miles of coastline and mostly flat topography—this is of particular concern. The state depends on coastal cities, where 75 percent of the population lives and where more than four-fifths of its economic activity takes place. When econ-

omists tally up the likely costs of rising seas, they rank Florida as the most WHEN THE SEAS RISE vulnerable state in the nation and Miami as one of the most vulnerable major cities in the world. When the Seas Rise takes us on an alarming journey from the dying coastal forests, where salt-killed tree trunks stand like sentinels of a retreating army, to the high tide–flooded streets of cities from St. Augustine to Key West. Meet the scientists at the University of Florida—researchers in biology, geol- ogy, entomology, horticulture, urban and regional planning, as well as other fields—who, along with experts around the state, are planning for the sea change already upon us and the greater changes to come. They are working

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