Construction and application of an aquatic ecological model for an emergent-macrophyte-dominated wetland: A case of Hanshiqiao wetland

•Emergent macrophytes produce obvious effects on ecological simulation of wetlands.•An aquatic ecological model is developed for emergent-macrophyte-dominated wetlands.•This model can effectively predict the effects of ecological restoration measures.

Aquatic ecological models can effectively simulate material flows and structural changes in complex ecosystems, and are thus widely used for pollution control and ecosystem management of wetlands. The emergent-macrophyte-dominated wetland is an important wetland type, but the ecological model researches for this wetland type are relatively limited. The Hanshiqiao wetland, located in the riparian floodplain of the Chaobai River, is a typical emergent-macrophyte-dominated wetland. In this research, it was adopted as the study case to develop an aquatic ecological model. In this model, the emergent macrophyte (Phragmites australis) was specifically considered. Two key processes were taken into account: the uptake nutrients of this emergent macrophyte, and its artificial harvesting. The results showed that the simulation effects using the new aquatic ecological model considering emergent aquatic plants are more accurate than those from previous models. Furthermore, using the proposed method, the ecological effects of four ecological restoration measures were compared. Results showed that the effect of biomass enhancement on ecological restoration was not obvious in the wetland and that increasing the water supplement was a little more effective than improving the water quality.