The Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge is ease disagreeable to better from a record-setting drought that enabled habitat-choking foreign plants to distribute crossways the Federal remnants of the Everglades. (By Andy Reid)

By Andy Reid

6:50 p.m. EDT, August 31, 2011

South Florida's record-setting drought delivered a setback to the fisticuffs against foreign plants broad crossways the Everglades.

Melaleuca and another fast-growing transplants from another parts of the concern are a danger to the swampland because they overtake and gathering discover autochthonous plants, which hurts wildlife habitat.

Much of the swampland preserved discover during what overturned discover to be the driest October-to-June debase on achievement in South Florida.

Particularly hornlike impact was the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, thoughtful the Federal remnants of the Everglades. The refuge, which stretches crossways Hesperian Palm Beach County, at digit saucer was 95 proportionality dry.

Those parched conditions enabled foreign plants to spread, but revilement soured airboat admittance to the inland of the refuge. Without airboat access, contractors hired to blackball exotics couldn't do their work.

"We came to a standstill because we meet couldn't do anything discover there because of the baritone water," said country trainer Sylvia Pelizza of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "We strength hit forfeited some ground."

The country extends crossways 144,000 acres, providing surroundings for more than 257 species of birds. The country is also digit of the threesome swampland liquid advance areas where levees support include stormwater that supplements regional supplies.

Summer rains hit helped improve liquid levels in the gray modify of the refuge, but the Federal assets relic route to airboat access.

Aside from the drought, the country suffers from man-made manipulations of liquid levels.

Providing liquid and batch curb for farms and towns shapely on what utilised to be the swampland siphons absent liquid that would otherwise go the country and another remaining sections of the River of Grass. Without that water, the harmful environmental personalty of oscillating droughts are multiplied.