Everglades National Park The Everglades ecosystem once stretched across a mosaic of wetlands and subtropical wilderness from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Unfortunately, by the mid-1900s nearly half of the slow-moving “river of grass” had been drained to make way for farms and urban development. The park was established in 1947, after decades of activism, to preserve a treasured 1.5 million acres of the ecosystem. The Everglades is a complex mix of salt and freshwater wetlands, hardwood hammocks, and pine rocklands that support a wide variety of flora and fauna. The ecosystem functions...