LEE COUNTY, Fla. — Bonita Springs is no stranger to the devastation of Hurricane Ian.
And as the conversation about long-term recovery begins experts at The Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) took us out by canoe, to see what lessons about resiliency can be gleaned from nature—and more specifically from mangroves.
The team has been studying this massive plot of mangroves since Hurricane Irma to get a better understanding of how these trees handle storm surge and how they can offer protection to our shorelines—and the people and buildings along them.
"Right now in terms of reassessing we're coming back to trees that we've already measured and seeing what happened to them," said Megan King, a student at The Water School at FGCU.
But once inside the tangle of trees, researchers run into a unique problem—they're having some trouble pinpointing how much of an impact the hurricane had on the plot.
"You know it's actually a good problem because if the trees had been more impacted it's easy to walk through and say 'Snapped off dead. Snapped off dead, snapped off dead.' And what we got is 'Alive, alive, alive,'" said Dr. Edwin "Win" Everham, a professor at The Water School at FGCU.
Their guess is that much of this plot was preserved by the storm surge Hurricane Ian brought in.
"I've always thought about mangroves protecting us from storm surge and now I understand that storm surge protects the mangroves," said Dr. Everham.
It's a shocking find, that they say points—yet again—to the important role these trees play in overall storm protection.
It also raises a few big questions about the role mangroves should play in rebuilding efforts.
"Should we be facilitating our migration inland as the sea levels rise? Should we be coming out and replanting in areas that may have been impacted by a storm such as Ian? I think that those are conversations that we need to have and we need to make those decisions based on solid scientific evidence that supports us investing those resources in it," said Dr. Brian Bovard, a professor at The Water School at FGCU.
It's a conversation they say will come after the human traumas of Ian begin to heal.
And it's one they say needs to happen in the face of rapid climate change.
"This not the last Ian that we're going to see so we got reminded that we've got to prepare ourselves," said Dr. Everham.