Climate change scenarios predict more unstable weather patterns, and future wetlands will therefore operate under larger hydrological variations. In this study, we aim to determine how wetland nutrient removal varies with hydrological regime.
We will use data from eight Swedish wetlands created to intercept agricultural runoff. Five of the wetlands are located on the east coast of Sweden, and three are located on the west coast of Sweden. Due to geographical location and wetland area to catchment area ratios, these wetlands experience different levels of hydrological variability and their estimated annual hydraulic loading rates range from low to high.
For each wetland, we have between 1.5 and 3.5 years of monitoring data based on automatic flow-proportional sampling. West coast wetland data is available from the Wetland Research Centre at Halmstad University (monitoring data from 2003 – 2006), and east coast wetland is available from the County Administrative Board of Kalmar County (monitoring data from 2016 – 2020). We will use this data to compare nutrient removal in wetlands with different hydrological regime and examine seasonal variations in nutrient removal in relation to hydraulic loading rate.
The data analysis for this study is a work in progress.
This study is financed by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.
Participants
Josefin Nilsson, PhD student
Antonia Liess, Senior Lecturer
Per Magnus Ehde, Research Engineer