It should come as no surprise that a huge swath of our wetlands have vanished from Southwest Florida in the last two decades.
The information is right out in the open. No one’s trying to hide it. It’s recorded in formal determinations, public records and perfectly legal permits, all of which are feely available for citizens to examine. Southwest Florida is one of the wettest places in the wettest state in the continental United States, and for decades all that water was seen as nothing but trouble.
Across much of Florida, including Manatee and Sarasota counties, the story is the same: watery places that once shimmered and surged with life have given way to rooftops, roadbeds, and retention ponds.
Manatee County runs into state roadblocks on wetlands protection
In Manatee County, wetlands policies have been at the center of political strife for years, but 2025 may take the cake. The county once boasted wetlands protection policies that exceeded state standards for decades. But those protections were scrapped in 2023 when Manatee County commissioners who were favorable toward developers controversially voted to remove nix them and defer to state standards instead.
The 2024 elections changed the board’s composition and a reversal of that relaxation in wetlands protection quickly became a top priority, until commissioners ran into a roadblock imposed by the state of Florida.
In reviewing Manatee’s policy change, Florida state agencies raised red flags. They indicated that tougher standards now could violate state rules enacted following Hurricane Ian that prevent local governments from imposing increased development standards after a storm.
The policy is meant to prevent local governments from burdening residents who are rebuilding after a hurricane, but in Manatee County the law could stop commissioners from restoring wetlands protections that had been in place for decades. That includes a requirement for new developments to leave a 50-foot buffer from wetlands, compared with the 25 feet required by the state.
Manatee commissioners chastised the state’s stance during a public meeting on May 8 when they intended to vote on the issue. Instead they delayed the vote because of the state’s reaction, and claimed developers’ influence was behind it.
“This is ridiculous, we are unfortunately stuck here,” Manatee County Commission Chairman George Kruse said at the time.
“This feels like we’re being baited more than we’re being honestly dealt with by Tallahassee,” he said. “We’re going to have to defer this.”
Kruse said the county would be ready to enact even more protective policies the day the state’s rules expired, but the state approved an updated version of the law making it harder to impose tougher local restrictions.
Wetlands have declined for decades in Sarasota and Manatee
Local environmental advocates say wetlands losses are no surprise given how long it’s been happening. These days, they worry that not much has changed, except the weather. They say that in the time of intensifying storms, development continues to pressure local wetlands.
The Sarasota Bay Estuary Program has helped document wetlands decline in Manatee and Sarasota counties, focusing on the upland fringe and shoreline areas. Director Dave Tomasko said wetlands play important role in filtering stormwater runoff, attenuating flood volumes and serve as good habitat.
“One of the frustrating things is we’ve known about how important wetlands loss is; we’ve known about this for 30 years,” Tomasko said. “It’s hard to get regulatory agencies and the average homeowner to understand how important wetland loss is. Sarasota Bay marshes and mangrove forests.”
In 1990, experts estimated that the two-county area had lost about 40% of the area’s wetlands, and development has only intensified since then.
Tomasko said that because the city of Sarasota is located by the bay, and Bradenton is next to the Manatee River, “most of the freshwater wetland losses occurred in Manatee County, and most of the saltwater losses occurred in the lower part of the bay in Sarasota County.”
His biggest concern? The growing intensity of rain events because of climate change as wetlands continue to diminish.
“A warming world will bring about an increase in the severity of rain events, and rare rain events will happen more often,” Tomasko said. “So in the next 30 years we’re going to get more intense rain than the last 30 years. At the same time, we’ve basically paved over or filled in a lot of the wetlands that used to be able to moderate some of this problem.
“We are seeing an increase in air temperatures, we are seeing an increase in water temperatures, we are seeing an increase in the rate of sea level rise, and it looks like we are seeing an intensification of rain events,” he said. “This is not me saying this, this is also what Resilient Florida Program, which was signed into law by (Governor) Ron DeSantis.”
Suncoast Waterkeeper Director Abbey Tyrna said the functional loss of wetlands has created another, almost hidden layer of wetlands loss. Developers are often able to offset wetlands impacts by the use of stormwater drainage improvements, or by paying to help preserve wetlands elsewhere, but Tyrna said the area still loses out on the specific local functions those wetlands provided.
Tyrna highlights the debate between environmental advocates and the Aqua development by Medallion Homes in 2018 and over a special wetlands permit from the Department of Environmental Protection that would allow for offsetting wetlands onsite by helping wetlands elsewhere. She said the same developer in that case, Carlos Beruff, could also have an impact on wetlands along the Manatee River tributary under Manatee County’s less protective laws with the East River Ranch development.
Tyrna praised efforts to restore wetlands protections by local officials, and said voting is the best way for residents to effect change.
She said recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings have decreased federal wetlands protections under the Clean Water Act. “So if you can’t rely on the state, and you can’t rely on the Clean Water Act and the U.S. government? Then what can you rely on?”
“The only way that we’re going to get out of this mess is for local governments to step up to protect wetlands, wetland buffers and streams and stream buffers,” she said. “So the only actionable thing that Floridians can do is put people in local office that want to improve water quality and also reduce flooding by protecting wetlands and tributaries.”
Interactive tool reveals severe wetlands loss in Collier and Lee counties
For those who know what wetlands loss means, seeing the loss of wetlands mapped out in Lee and Collier counties feels like a gut punch.
Created by the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, and quietly released earlier this year, an interactive online tool charts the disappearance of that area’s wetlands – decades of erasure now visible in pale green and Pepto pink. And though the mapmakers chose the color marking the now-dry acres solely for visual contrast, that it’s the same hue as a heartburn remedy may seem fitting to some worried about overdevelopment.
Heartburn might well characterize how this all hits Capt. Franklin Adams, a native south Florida Gladesman from a family that fished, hunted and roamed the watery woods. “You know the story,” he says. “We saw so many irreplaceable, special places drained, damaged, done away with.”
So Adams has spent his life fighting for those places, taking newcomers to see them, filing countless public comments on government projects, steering environmental nonprofits and generally speaking and showing up for what he holds precious. Adams is still angry and he’s still energized – he’s got kids and grandkids to think of – quoting what the late environmental advocate Joel Kupenberg once told him: “I’m sure that when the devil was preparing hell, the first thing he did was to drain the wetlands.”
What happened to the 70 square miles in Collier that were wetlands?
In just 24 years, Collier County lost 22,000 acres of wetlands or 17%; Lee County, 20,000 or 31% – nearly 70 square miles.
Taking both counties together, “there has been 22% loss of wetlands between 1999 and 2023,” says the Conservancy’s Senior Environmental Planning Specialist Julianne Thomas, who led the mapping effort. “Wetlands are not split evenly between the two counties – in 1999, the wetland split was one third of the regional wetlands were in Lee with two thirds in Collier. In 2023, the wetland split is 29% Lee County, 71% Collier County.”
A new Tractor Supply Company is seen along Daniels Parkway in Fort Myers on Monday, June 16, 2025.
Most of what’s disappeared the past two decades – more than 60%, according to the nonprofit Conservancy’s analysis – is now development.
The map, using data pulled from government agencies and tech companies using geographic information systems, known as GIS, doesn’t explain why or how or how they went away. It simply lays out where they did.
“It just shows us where wetlands have disappeared over this almost 25-year period,” says Amber Crooks, senior environmental policy advisor with the Conservancy.
Wild turkeys feed in a dry marsh off of Treeline Ave in Fort Myers on Monday, March 31, 2025.
What the map makes clear is that Southwest Florida is among the country’s hotspots for wetland loss, a dubious distinction established in a 2014 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study that singled out Lee County as a place meriting particular concern.
But why should anyone care? The answers aren’t just tree-huggery.
It’s clearly in humans’ fiscal interest to preserve the places that hold water on the landscape. Wetlands are not just soggy parcels of undevelopable land. They are sponges that blunt floods, filters that cleanse water, and sanctuaries that cradle a third of the country’s threatened and endangered species.
Wetlands and economic prosperity are braided together, with clear consequences when they vanish, says Professor Win Everham, a Florida Gulf Coast University ecologist.
Among myriad benefits, wetlands act as natural filters that prevent harmful algal blooms. Without them, nutrients and runoff go directly into rivers, creeks and coastal waters, causing algal blooms that harm tourism and local businesses. “It turns out to be bad for our economy if the beaches are filled with dead fish — and red drift algae and red tide are getting fed from the things that flow off of our landscape into the near coastal waters. (It’s) just as if we were driving boats and pouring fertilizer out the back of the boat,” he says.
Beyond absorbing pollution, that ability to retain water helps in hurricane times.
Wild flowers bloom at the Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed on the Flint Pen Strand trails in Bonita Springs on Friday, May 23, 2025. Southwest Florida is in a drought, but consistent rains could be on the horizon.
“One acre of wetland can store over a million gallons of flood water,” Crooks explains. “These wetlands can hold onto that water in times of storm events and release it gradually compared to when you have impervious surfaces.”
In other words, where wetlands go, safety follows, both human and ecological.
If you don’t know how things were, it all might look just fine
Across the region, the historic balance has been upset, but because the change happened incrementally, it often goes unnoticed – particularly by those newly arrived.
That phenomenon has a name, says Matt DePaolis the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation’s director of environmental policy. It’s a version of the “Overton window” effect: the idea that people’s expectations shift based on what they perceive as normal. “Because we have that influx of new people, they’re always really basing what they think (about) what nature looked like on the moment that they arrived.”
This shifting baseline means that many residents have no idea what’s been lost. They may see a neighborhood lake and assume it’s natural, not knowing it replaced a cypress dome. They may paddle through a canal and marvel at the fish, unaware the original wet prairie that once supported a richer array of life is now buried under fill.
The consequences extend beyond perception. When wetlands disappear, their ecological functions don’t just transfer elsewhere. Developers often build government-mandated replacement wetlands in an effort to comply with mitigation rules, but experts say these artificial systems often fall far short.
Mandated mitigation may ignore specific wildlife species’ needs, Crooks says. For example, state wildlife officials consider endangered Florida panthers a “wetland dependent species” because the big cats frequent cypress swamp habitats.
But a developer required to create a wetlands-for-condo replacement may well not choose (or be able to) replicate an old-growth bald cypress strand. “Despite being functionally replaced per the state’s (rules) a loss of overall wetland acres may hurt the panther, since this species requires large areas of habitat.”
Wood storks, a threatened species, are another example, Crooks says. “While mitigation may replace the overall wetland function lost to development, I don’t believe there is a requirement in the state’s wetland rules to replace ‘like-for-like’ for short-hydroperiod wetlands.” Those places (as opposed to wetlands that stay soaked more of the year) are needed for birds like the storks, roseate spoonbills and ibis that feed by touch, since they dry down at certain times of the year to levels low enough for the birds to feel their prey. “Therefore, mitigation wetlands may miss the mark on the needs of some wildlife species,” she says.
Bottom line: “The created wetlands just don’t perform as well as the natural wetlands,” Crooks says. “They can try to recreate Mother Nature and they might hit a few points, but it’s just not going to be as effective as keeping the wetlands where they’re at.”
New policy could create a broken wetlands impact credit system
DePaolis sees the policy landscape as skewed against wetland protection. A bill presented to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis June 18 would allow developers to buy wetland mitigation credits in distant watersheds, breaking the link between destruction and local restoration.
“We’ve set up a system that is just primed for wetland destruction and it’s not going away,” he said.
Everham, who’s taught at FGCU (home of The Water School) since its founding, estimates that Southwest Florida has already lost around half its original wetlands, both coastal mangroves and inland swamps. In their place come problems that compound over time: flashier flooding, declining water quality, and dwindling aquifer recharge.
“We’re not going to run out of water,” Everham says, “but we’re going to run out of cheap water.”
SWFL’s dependable afternoon rains? Wetlands help make them
The wetlands’ absence reverberates even in the region’s climate. Watery places contribute to the cycle of afternoon rains through evapotranspiration, in which water moves from earth to sky and back again. Without the rains, the land dries out and heats up.
“Areas where wetlands are removed become hotter due to loss of cooling evaporation,” Everham said.
As the professor explains, standing water on the landscape heats up, evaporates and forms clouds. As they rise and cool, they drop the rain back down. Plants are a key part of the cycle, releasing water from their leaves into the atmosphere which can then rain back down, Everham says.
“You get rid of the plant, you get rid of the forested wetlands, you get rid of the standing water, and you’re not priming that pump,” he said.
Bald cypress trees in a wetland at Six Mile Cypress Slough in Fort Myers provide an area where birds can forage and nest and rest.
And then there’s biodiversity. Of all the species federally listed as threatened or endangered, fully a third are found exclusively in wetlands. Half rely on them for part of their lifecycle. That means every acre lost may represent more than just habitat; it could be a tipping point for species survival.
There are efforts underway to change course. Both the Conservancy and SCCF are urging local governments to adopt more holistic land-use planning. Piecemeal permitting decisions may comply with regulations on paper, but taken together, they often result in irreversible ecological harm.
The Conservancy’s map makes it easier to do just that. Each vanished acre has been recorded. Each managed wetland made plain. The map doesn’t judge or editorialize. It simply shows the truth, then invites us to reckon with it.
“We need to start questioning … if people should be building in these areas.” says DePaolis.
Herald-Tribune Staff Writer Jesse Mendoza contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota, Manatee wetlands among those drained for development