Ecosystem Characteristics
The Everglades are dominated by sawgrass in water; this is the titular "River of Grass" popularized by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1947. This river contains a wide variety of plant and animal life. An early American environmentalist named Gifford Pinchot said of the Everglades, "It is a region so different that it hardly seems to belong to the United States. It is full of the most vivid and most interesting life on land, in the air, and in the water. It is a land of strangeness, separate and apart from the common things we all know so well."
The sawgrass grows in prairies or strands, in between channels of water in a shallow river 100 miles (160 km) long and 60 miles (97 km) wide flowing from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Some authors refer to the sawgrass and water combination as the "true Everglades" or just "the Glades". Prior to the first drainage attempts in 1905, the sheetflow, or the wide shallow river starting in Lake Okeechobee, occupied nearly a third of the lower Florida peninsula. Though sawgrass remains the main feature of the Everglades, other ecosystems are scattered among the marshes and prairies, and their borders are sometimes imperceptible.
Read more about this topic: Geography And Ecology Of The Everglades