Miami-Dade County enhances park's climate resiliency and recreational opportunities

Facing rising sea levels and aging infrastructure, a coastal park in Miami-Dade County, Fla. took an opportunity to conduct environmental remediation to also make recreational improvements and enhance climate resiliency. Only 51 of Chapman Field Park’s 480 acres are developed for active recreational use; the rest of the park is mangrove forests, tidal waterways and other sensitive coastal ecosystems, according to Carlos Lopez, a Miami-Dade County parks planner.

“Miami-Dade County is on the front lines of sea level rise impact,” Lopez said. “For us in parks, that means thinking not only about how we’re functioning today, but how our assets are going to perform decades from now, as flooding, storm surge, saltwater intrusion — all those things — build up and become greater concerns.”

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Miami-Dade County’s Chapman Field Park Resilience and Restoration Project was the 2026 NACo Achievement Award “Best in Category” winner in Parks and Recreation. 

Before Chapman Field Park was a space to play baseball or take out a kayak on Biscayne Bay, it was a World War I army airfield and a landfill. In 2014, the county discovered high levels of arsenic on the fields, and a sea level rise and mitigation study projected that regional sea levels could rise approximately 1.5 feet by 2050 and more than five feet by 2100, increasing flooding risks throughout the park. The study also determined that the baseball fields and portions of the access roadway were in critical or poor condition and needed rehabilitation.

“Rather than treating the remediation, the recreation improvements and the resilience as separate projects, we used the opportunity to address them all together,” Lopez said. “… All these studies really gave us a more complete picture of what could responsibly occur at the site. 

“Using that information to guide our capital decisions, we were able to make investments that made sense, and how the current community recreation needs could be addressed without ignoring the facilities and the impacts that they might experience decades from now.”

The first phase of the Chapman Field Park Resilience and Restoration Project included remediating contaminated soils, renovating a ball field and removing invasive species, such as Australian pine. 

“Australian pines were historically introduced into the ecosystem down here by early settlers because it was a fast-growing windbreak and shade tree for coastal areas,” Lopez said. “But today we recognize it as an invasive [species]. So, part of restoring places like Chapman Field is undoing some of those historic landscape decisions and bringing those native systems back into our parks.”

The parks system recycled sections of the removed Australian pines into playground elements, according to Lopez. 

The second phase of the project addressed environmental restoration and recreational improvements, including the installation of a new T-ball field for youth, and the third phase further remediated portions of the park previously affected by landfill activities. Two deteriorated baseball fields were reconstructed to ensure resilience to sea level rise and elevated to improve drainage. 

“South Florida incorporating sea level rise into our infrastructure planning is becoming really common, and in Miami-Dade, considering sea level rise as part of how we approach capital investment, it just makes sense based on where we live,” Lopez said. “We’re experiencing tidal flooding, storm surges and that’s affecting not only our buildings but the roads, the athletic fields, all of these other elements of the park, and whether residents can actually use a park after significant rain events and storm events.”

What stands out about the Chapman Field project is the site-specific analysis and the way that that was translated into implementation, Lopez said. 

“We’re not looking at a regional sea level rise map and saying, ‘Oh, this park is vulnerable,’” Lopez said. “We drilled down into the site, and we examined all the different assets in the site to see how their vulnerability changes over time horizons.”

Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces has now carried out site-specific sea level rise studies at all of its 13 coastal parks, and is beginning to conduct studies on some of its low-lying inland parks, according to Lopez. 

After 11 years of work (including delays due to a funding shortfall and Hurricane Irma), Chapman Field Park reopened last summer. An upgraded canoe and kayak launch, with a new floating dock that can handle King Tides, is set to open later this year.

“It sends a message of what we can accomplish, that it’s within our realm of possibility,” Lopez said. “The county can address contamination, environmental sensitivity, aging infrastructure and climate vulnerability, and still return that land to meaningful public use for the community.”