In the early 2000s, Florida began a large-scale effort to restore the Picaune Strand, a 55,000-acre swamp in the southwestern part of the state. Decades earlier, the land had been drained and divided into a grid of roads and canals by a real estate company that sold it as dry lots. The restoration project was designed to reverse that damage and create one of the last viable habitats for the endangered Florida panther.

The restoration drew attention beyond the ecological work itself. One property owner, a Navy veteran named Jesse Hardy, refused to sell his 60 acres in the middle of the planned restoration area. The state eventually acquired the land through a legal settlement, clearing the way for the project to proceed.

The story of the swamp’s decline began decades before the restoration effort. In 1928, the Tamiami Trail Highway opened, connecting Tampa and Miami for the first time. The road cut across the natural southward flow of water through the Everglades, reducing the amount of water that reached the national park for years.

In the 1950s and 1960s, brothers Leonard and Jack Rosen, who had founded the Gulf American Land Corporation, began selling plots of swamp land in southwestern Florida. They flew prospective buyers down from northern states and showed them promotional material about nearby developments. The company called the area Golden Gate Estates and dug hundreds of miles of canals to drain the land and make it suitable for sale. By the late 1960s, state regulators stepped in, and the company pleaded guilty to fraud charges. The brothers eventually sold the business.

The canal system had significant environmental consequences. It lowered the groundwater level, redirected fresh water into estuaries, and made wildfires more frequent. The drainage worked efficiently, but it also damaged the region’s ecology. By the mid-1970s, only a tenth of Golden Gate Estates had been developed, leaving large areas of the southern section, later known as Picaune Strand, as an empty grid of roads and canals.

The Florida panther population was already in serious decline by this time. In the mid-1990s, only an estimated 20 to 30 panthers remained in the wild, and inbreeding had caused genetic defects. To address this, eight female pumas from Texas were released in South Florida in 1995 to introduce new genetic diversity.

The state began buying back land in the southern part of Golden Gate Estates in 1985, acquiring lots that had been sold to owners across the country years earlier. The buyout cost more than $150 million. In 1999, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began filling in a canal it had built decades earlier on the CMI River, marking a shift from draining waterways to restoring them.

The Picaune project, formally part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, became the first project in that plan to break ground. It was also one of the largest wetland restoration efforts in the plan. The work involved filling in canals, removing roads, and restoring natural water flow across the landscape. The project’s managers emphasized the importance of restoring the area’s plant communities, which they expected would in turn support animal populations.

In March 2010, a biologist flying over the area photographed a female panther with two kittens on a road that had recently been stripped of its asphalt. Biologists working on the project saw the image as a hopeful sign, though they noted that the ground was still dry and the restoration was far from complete.

The restoration work involved several stages. The first canal, known as Prairie, was filled in using soil piles left over from the original digging. This approach was used for other canals as well. After the canal was plugged, the water table nearby rose, and one monitoring well began recording water above ground surface for the first time.

Later phases of the project required pumps to manage water levels, particularly in areas where residential development had expanded north of the project. The largest pumping station, at Faka Union Canal, became operational in 2021. It was designed to move water away from developed areas and spread it across the restored landscape.

The Tamiami Trail itself also received modifications. A mile-long bridge was opened in 2013, and additional spans were completed in 2019, allowing water to flow under the road toward Everglades National Park for the first time in decades. The new bridges increased water flow into the park by 80 percent.

Monitoring data collected since the mid-2000s showed that water was standing on the land longer and that plant species adapted to flooding were returning. The independent committee that evaluates Everglades restoration found fewer fires and fewer non-native plants in the areas where water had returned.

The restoration did not achieve all its goals without challenges. The committee also reported that the area faced issues with invasive vertebrates and that conditions for the red-cockaded woodpecker, which requires old pine forests, had worsened. Additionally, not all the canals could be plugged immediately; a protective levee and culverts were needed first.

By 2024, monitoring photos showed a visible transformation in the restored area. Young cypress forests had grown, and the land was holding water again. By early 2025, about 99 percent of the project area had been partly or fully rewetted. Wading birds, including roseate spoonbills and storks, were photographed near the pump stations.

The Florida panther population, meanwhile, had grown since the genetic rescue efforts of the 1990s. A 2019 study estimated that the population had increased from 20 to 30 animals to roughly 120 to 230 adults and young, largely because of the Texas females introduced in 1995. Picaune did not create the panthers, but it connected existing habitats, including the Florida Panther Refuge, Fakahatchee Strand Park, and the Ten Thousand Islands Refuge, into a continuous territory.

Panthers have continued to face risks from traffic. In 2025, two young kittens were struck and killed by vehicles on a road northwest of the project, and vehicle collisions were the leading cause of panther deaths that year. Researchers also noted that the long-term success of the restoration for panthers would depend on whether kittens born in the area could survive long enough to find their own territories.

In January 2026, the Army Corps released a photo of a panther kitten photographed among the trees of Picaune Strand State Forest. According to project reports, panthers were hunting, living, and mating on the restored land, though no official count was provided.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held at the Miller Pump Station in January 2026, marking the completion of the project. According to the Army Corps, the restoration will benefit about 100,000 acres in total, including neighboring refuges, nearly double the size of Picaune itself.

Monitoring continues beyond the completed project. Researchers have set up camera traps to track panthers and their prey. In March 2026, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s cameras at a nearby preserve captured a female panther with three kittens, and in July the cameras recorded her again with one of them.