RECOVER indicator regions in the Everglades Depth Estimation Network

The Restoration, Coordination, and Verification (RECOVER) program is a collaboration among federal and state agencies, Tribes, and other institutions that conduct and guide scientific research for Everglades restoration in southern Florida. RECOVER members evaluate restoration plans and designs and assess real-world environmental conditions. One of the tools used by the RECOVER program is the South Florida Water Management District's (SFWMD) Regional Simulation Model (RSM; SFWMD, 2005). The RSM is a hydrologic model used for restoration planning and design. Indicator regions (IRs) are collections of adjacent modeling cells from the RSM selected to be hydrologically representative of Everglades subregions. Many of the performance measures (PMs) that are used to evaluate restoration plans and assess the success of Everglades restoration are calculated at the scale of individual IRs. Examples of these performance measures include the number and duration of dry events, water level depth relative to land surface, and fire risk. The USGS Everglades Depth Estimation Network (EDEN; Haider and others, 2020) is an integrated network of over 200 water-level gages, hydrologic models, and ecological applications that provides gridded daily water-level data on both 400-meter and 50-meter grids from 1991–present. EDEN daily water levels are used by RECOVER to monitor real-world conditions and assess restoration progress. This data release provides shapefiles with polygons of regions that are homologous to the RSM IRs but provided on the EDEN 400-meter and 50-meter grids rather than the irregular triangular mesh of the RSM.