Florida Everglades

Engineers hope the new, autonomous lake monitoring technology they're developing will help keep Central Florida lakes clean — starting with the home of a historic open-water swim.

Back in the 1960s, it almost became the world’s largest airport, a six-runway behemoth, many times the size of Kennedy International Airport in New York, for supersonic passenger jets.

The Trump and DeSantis administrations have characterized the region as a treacherous swamp where little more than alligators and pythons reside. The Miccosukee call this place home—and have so for generations.

The United States’ national parks have an inherent contradiction. They must be kept so people can visit and enjoy them while also protecting their fragile wild spaces.

Demonstrators gathered at the entrance to the new Florida Everglades migrant detention center dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" as President Trump made an opening-day visit to the controversial facility on Tuesday. "It’s just about creating fear, and it’s a bit sickening," said one protester.

Florida Senate Minority Leader Lori Berman is demanding Florida Attorney James Uthmeier respond to a range of questions she raises about the state’s “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center in the Everglades.

A coalition of groups, ranging from environmental activists to Native Americans advocating for their ancestral homelands, converged outside an airstrip in the Florida Everglades Saturday to protest the imminent construction of an immigrant detention center.

Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava late Tuesday acknowledged that Gov. Ron DeSantis had the power to buy a county-owned airport in the Everglades to build an immigration detention center, but said she has “significant concerns” about the project.

Friends of the Everglades on Sunday is organizing a protest to a proposed plan by state officials to build a massive detention center to house and process suspected undocumented immigrants on the site of a jetport in the Everglades.

In case you missed the event, you can listen to the two panel discussions between WLRN Environment Editor Jenny Staletovich and experts at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School and its signature Climate Café series.

Listen to the live event and panel discussion between WLRN Environment editor Jenny Staletovich and a team of experts tackling today's Everglades challenges.

University of Florida scientist Tracie Baker, canoed the same extremely remote 130-mile path that explorer Hugh Willoughby traveled 125 years ago — with the goal of comparing water in 2022 with 1897 and assessing the intrusion of modern chemicals into some of the most remote wilderness in America.