A Brief History of Anthropogenic Impacts on Florida's Groundwater Systems: Recognized Shortcomings, and Identified Knowledge and Process Needs

Abstract:  Florida’s groundwaters suffered from ignorance, resource exploitation, inappropriate waste disposal practices and bad land use decisions during the last half of the 20^th Century.  Efforts to address the identified groundwater problems have historically been hampered by incomplete understanding of groundwater systems, lack of essential data, limited abilities of available modeling tools, inadequate regulatory/management approaches and myopic tendencies of practitioners and regulators.

This paper focuses on emerging groundwater knowledge needs in the areas of planning, timely data collection and monitoring, comprehensive problem definition, identification and quantification/tracking of emerging trends, problem documentation, enhancement of modeling and analytical tools, and suggested management/regulatory strategies. Five Florida case studies focusing of different groundwater issues featuring differing management approaches will be used to highlight recognized shortcomings, fatal flaws and identified knowledge and process needs.