Interregional Comparison of Karst Disturbance: West-Central Florida and Southeast Italy

The karst disturbance index (KDI) consists of 30 environmental indicators contained within the five broad categories: geomorphology, hydrology, atmosphere, biota, and cultural. The purpose of this research is to apply the KDI to two distinct karst areas, West Florida, and Apulia, Italy. Through its application, the utility of the index can be validated and other important comparisons can be made, such as differences in the karst legislations implemented in each region and effect of time exposure to human occupation to each karst terrain. Humans have impacted the karst of southeast Italy for thousands of years compared to decades in west-central Florida. However, west-central Florida is more populated than southeast Italy establishing differences in the scale of human occupation between the two studied areas. These two differences allowed for the determination of whether length of human occupation or population density is most influential in the anthropogenic destruction of karst terrains. Similarly, Italian karst is more diverse than the karst found in west-central Florida, aiding in the evaluation of the applicability of each KDI indicator through the application of the index in distinctly different karst terrains. Overall, major impacts for southeast Italy include quarrying, stone clearing, and the dumping of refuse into caves, while west-central Florida karst suffers most from the infilling of sinkholes, soil compaction, changes in the water table, and vegetation removal.