Historically, the University Park campus of FIU is part of the Everglades drainage. The campus is located on the eastern side of this drainage, in an area historically of short hydroperiod marshes, wet for perhaps 6 months of the year. Since the establishment of the modern Everglades system, some 6500 years ago, this area became a marsh dominated by sawgrass (still present in the Preserve) and interspersed with tree islands at slightly higher elevations. The earliest photograph available to us, of the Tamiami Airport in 1966, shows the patchy vegetation across the canal that parallels the present Florida Turnpike. This almost certainly resulted from the tree islands after the marshes were drained during the 1920's, with the construction of the borrow canal associated with the construction of the Tamiami Trail. The vegetation on this map within the airport area, congruent with the present Preserve, is most likely associated with an earlier tree island. Brad Bennett (from student projects in his Restoration Ecology Course) has shown the presence of organic muck soils in the northern part of the Preserve, associated with such vegetation.

This area of vegetation is present in the photograph of our second building, Deuxieme Maison (DM) in 1974, four years before the establishment of the Preserve. The site of the Preserve contained vegetation because of this early history, and the chance that it was not in the way of any of the taxiways and runways of the airport.