FGCU ecologist Win Everham does research in a unique part of Florida: Picayune Strand State Forest. The 55,000 acres of Everglades habitat was the site of a failed real estate scheme. Now it’s a cornerstone of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

The area is being transformed from asphalt roads and canals back into a thriving ecosystem. Everham monitors resident fish, frogs, and insects to learn how well a system can recover from such a change. “I don’t know any place else in Florida — any place else in the world — where they were well down a path of putting in a community for maybe hundreds or thousands of people and then stopped. And then someone else said, ‘Let’s dig up the roads and fill in the canals.’”

• Edwin Everham