India, Sept. 28 -- Millions of acres of the Everglades look the way they do today because of a decision made well over a century ago, one whose effects on the region's fire and water cycles have outlasted the tree's own historic peak. In the early 1900s, Florida was racing to turn its swampland into farms and towns, and a fast-growing tree from Australia looked like just the tool for the job. The tree, Melaleuca quinquenervia, was planted along canals and levees to soak up standing water and keep soil from blowing away. In fact, a 2006 study in the journal Castanea by researchers F. Allen Dray Jr., Bradley Bennett and Ted Center has traced the tree's true arrival in Florida to 1886, through more than a dozen individual introductions from ...