The Hole in the Donut project is an effort to rehabilitate a 2,400 hectare section of Florida’s Everglades National Park. It is an area that was developed as farmland in the 1920s and continued to be farms as the park grew up around it. It is, in effect, an unnatural "hole" in the middle of the park.

The farmers altered the natural ecosystem. They used a technique called "rock plowing" to break up the rocks underneath the thin soil to make it more suitable for crops.The farms were gradually acquired by the park. By 1975 the last farmers were gone and the "hole" became part of the park. But there was extensive wetland restoration to be done.

A non-native tree called Brazilian pepper or Florida holly aggressively colonized fallow farmland. It was originally brought in for the ornamental plant trade because of its attractive red berries, but it soon naturalized itself to the region. When the farms were abandoned, Brazilian pepper created a non-native forest that has invaded everything. The only way to restore the "hole" was to entirely remove the trees and the loose rocky soil they grow on and to let the natural habitat reestablish itself.

This is an expensive process and makes the "hole" look even worse for a short time. But after about six months the bare sites will be recolonized by native plants and begin to look more like the surrounding park. I followed a scientist who has worked for many years monitoring the slow process of reclaiming the "Hole in the Donut."