Hurricane impacts to Lake Okeechobee: Altered hydrology creates difficult management trade offs

Human modifications to ecosystems can exacerbate effects of natural disturbances, but interactions between disturbance and altered hydrology are rarely assessed. Lake Okeechobee, Florida, was impacted by four large hurricanes in 2004-2005 that caused large lake-wide reductions in the coverage and biomass of aquatic macrophytes. We quantified dramatic changes in the aquatic plant and littoral fish assemblage after hurricanes, including decreased fish richness, diversity, and biomass, and large reductions in the species that support important fisheries. Human-induced hydrologic changes prevented the lake from expanding to the historically connected floodplain during and following hurricanes, which likely exacerbated impacts to aquatic plant and fish communities. Altered hydrology has complicated management scenarios for returning the lake to pre-hurricane conditions because policy options that will initiate recovery at Lake Okeechobee (i.e., lower water levels) will exert negative impacts on east and west coast Florida estuaries. Anthropogenic modifications raise difficult trade-offs for ecosystem restoration.