Advances in Engineered Wetlands for Treating Agricultural Runoff
A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Water Quality and Contamination".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 September 2023) | Viewed by 3899
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Special Issue Editors
Interests: constructed wetlands; pollution control; nutrients; sediments; marsh hydraulics
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Modern agriculture produces high yields of crops that are necessary for life, but it also produces runoff that may have large impacts on the receiving waterbodies. This non-point discharge contains nutrients, often dominated by nitrogen (N), in the form of nitrate, and phosphorus (P), along with suspended solids. The runoff also often contains pesticide residues, used to prevent insect damage and control weeds. Efforts are well under way to prevent damage to the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Erie, the Baltic Sea, and other sensitive receiving waterbodies. However, there remains a further critical need to prevent contaminants from reaching receiving waters, which can be partly achieved by best management practices. End-of-field buffer systems can provide major reductions, and these prominently include constructed wetlands (CWs).
It has been thirty years since the pioneering work of the US Department of Agriculture (Wengrzynek and Terrell, 1990) and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (Arheimer and Wittgren, 1994) regarding CWs for treating agricultural runoff. Hundreds of wetlands for runoff control have been created. These wetlands vary greatly depending on the crop and the site conditions. In the Yakima Valley of Washington State, runoff is from corn, wheat, peppers, cherries, peaches, mint, and grapes. In the midwestern US, corn and wheat dominate the landscape. In Florida, we find vast sugarcane fields. The same holds for all other regions of our planet. The result has been a wide variety of “recipes” for implementing wetland buffers. Despite this diversity, there is an underlying commonality of wetland biogeochemistry.
Although wetlands are already being successfully implemented in many locations, there is plenty of room for more science and engineering to increase wetland effectiveness. Wetlands are a “low tech” remedy, but they can be made more effective if the science is better understood.
The goal of this Special Issue is to present current advances in the knowledge base for wetland systems intended to control nutrients, solids, and pesticides in agricultural runoff.
Prof. Dr. Robert H. Kadlec
Dr. Karin S. Tonderski
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- constructed wetlands
- agricultural runoff
- nitrogen
- phosphorus
- sediments
- pesticides
- ecological engineering
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