Water Quality and Ecosystem Modeling of Tidal Wetlands

Abstract

A water quality and ecosystem model is developed to simulate nutrients, heavy metals, and aquatic plants in the Erh-Chung Flood Way wetland in Taiwan. A sediment system was incorporated into the model. The RMA2 and WASP/EUTRO5 models were adopted as the basic framework with modifications and enhancement of kinetics to incorporate ecosystem dynamics and sediment-water interactions. Hydrodynamic results from the RMA2 model were used to quantify mass transport for the EUTRO5 model. The major effort in this study was adding four water quality variables; macrophyte biomass, suspended solids, heavy metals in macrophytes, and heavy metals in the water column and sediment were incorporated into EUTRO5 to form the water quality and ecosystem model. Site-specific water quality data were collected to support the model calibration and verification analyses.