Doctoral Dissertation Research: Human Dimensions and Ecological Modeling of Mangrove Change in Florida

Florida State University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

Wetland valuation is contested because of the coexistence of many diverse ideas about their value and use. This proposed research operates from the central premise that critical inquiry should be directed towards documenting how these competing constructions play out in legal and geographical realms. The Florida Mangrove Preservation Act (MPA) of 1996 was enacted as a means to lessen the alteration and destruction of these contested coastal habitats. Although ultimate responsibility for the enforcement of the MPA rests with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), regulatory status has been granted to some smaller scales of governance. Within these regulatory jurisdictions (regional, county, and municipal), numerous attempts have been made to alter the MPA as a result of conflict over the intended uses of mangrove habitats. In Naples, for example, development interests and environmentalists both attempted to rewrite the mangrove law and gain local control of Naples "mangrove space" through referendum. This study proposes to document how different areas of the state address mangrove management under the guidance of the same general law. Moreover it documents how competing constructions of mangrove habitat manifest themselves within the institutions granted regulatory jurisdiction under the Mangrove Protection Act of 1996, and how these institutions, in turn, shape the spatial and temporal patterns of mangrove alteration. The study has three specific objectives: 1) to characterize the historical distribution of mangroves in the state of Florida; 2) to document variability in the protection of mangroves at regional, county, and municipal scales; and 3) to model future mangrove distribution. To these ends, a synthesis of remote sensing, policy analysis, and Markovian modeling will be invoked. A spatially and temporally consistent study of mangrove inventory has not been conducted in Florida. Remote sensing change detection, utilizing a combination of principle components analysis and band ratio techniques, will be employed to identify regional trends in mangrove loss or gain from the mid 1980s until the present. Because enforcement of the MPA goes beyond the simple empirics of change detection, open-ended interviews and formal surveys will be administered at various scales of governance. Through the application of multidimensional scaling and case study analysis, interview and survey data will provide a more nuanced characterization as to how jurisdictions interpret and enact the provisions of the MPA. Markovian modeling will weight the historic trends in mangrove loss or gain according to policies and perceptions delineated from survey data so as to identify which jurisdictions are most likely to incur mangrove loss in the future. Through the multiple permutations of the jurisdictional weightings a range of mangrove alteration scenarios, each within the codes specified by the MPA, will be obtained. The results of this study provide a template for incorporating quantitative and qualitative information into a spatially explicit, temporal framework. These results will present the first historically consistent view of the spatial extent of mangroves in the state of Florida, one that incorporates the role of individual actors and institutional dynamics. The research is also of importance to larger theoretical issues embedded in the human-environment interaction It explores the diversity of valuation patterns and processes, which may afford more critical insight than debates over the exact dollar value of wetlands. Furthermore, this projects attempts to fuse together the equally important, but disparate veins of thought that constitute human and physical geography. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.