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Modeling Hydrodynamic and Hydrological Processes in Tidal Wetlands

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Abstract

Hydrologic processes in tidal wetlands are important regulators controlling the growth and productivity of salt marsh plants. Understanding hydrodynamic and hydrological processes is therefore critical to sustaining ecosystem functions and productivity in tidal wetlands. We used remote sensing and geographic information system to determine the spatial distributions of Suaeda heteroptera and Phragmites australis plants on the tidal-flats of Liao River Estuary (LRE), China. Next, hydrodynamic modelling was performed to characterize the water levels and tidal currents in these wetland waters. After extensive calibration and validation against field data, we proposed a 2D circulation structure for the LRE that can be used to calculate the hydrological parameters in different areas of the tidal wetlands. The simulation results showed that the hydrological characteristics of the tidal wetlands were primarily dependent on local topography and water level. The prevalent plant community in the LRE, dominated by Suaeda heteroptera, was abundant across a large range of flood times (0.79 ~ 3.22 h/day), inundation frequencies (11 ~ 52 times/month), and max flooding depths (0.42 ~ 0.81 m). However, certain hydrological conditions did appear to limit the spatial distributions of wetland plant communities. These findings have provided detailed methods of a novel approach to quantitatively assess habitat status in tidal-flat wetlands.

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Data availability

The research data are provided in the Supplement.

Code Availability

MIKE 21 HD module.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFC1407704), the National Nature Science Foundation of China (51879028), the Open Fund of State Key Laboratory of Coastal and Offshore Engineering, Dalian University of Technology (LP2009), and Dalian Science and Technology Innovation Fund Project (Grant No. 2021JJ11CG001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Ocean Science and Environment, Dalian Ocean University, Dalian, 116023, China

    Yini Wang & Mingliang Zhang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Coastal and Offshore Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116025, China

    Mingliang Zhang

Authors
  1. Yini Wang
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  2. Mingliang Zhang
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Contributions

YN performed the experiment and the data analyses, ML contributed to the conception of the study and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Mingliang Zhang.

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Highlights

• The hydrodynamic model was used to simulate the wetting and drying cycles in tidal wetlands of the LRE.

• RS and GIS technology were used to measure the spatial distributions of salt-marsh plants in tidal wetlands.

• New insights into the analysis of suitable hydro-period conditions in tidal wetlands are presented.

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Wang, Y., Zhang, M. Modeling Hydrodynamic and Hydrological Processes in Tidal Wetlands. Wetlands 42, 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-021-01519-1

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