An eco-hydrological model for modelling hydrological processes in a riparian wetland with the unclosed boundary

Abstract

It has always been one of the key problems of wetland science to explore the ecological-hydrological interaction mechanism of plants in floodplain wetland. However, the current traditional hydrological model cannot reveal effectively and quantitatively the hydrological process from the spatiotemporal method due to the complex multi-interface features of wetland. In this paper, we constructed innovatively a distributed model for Modelling of the Eco-hydrological process between the Interaction of Surface water & Soil water in Wetlands environment (MEISSW) on the unclosed boundary of Honghe National Nature Reserve (HNNR) in Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. It is the first effort globally to establish the MEISSW model on the aim at simulating the spatiotemporal transformation characteristics of surface water and soil water in a riparian wetland. Four rainfall events with different hydrological and meteorological characteristics were used to calibrate parameters, and the other three rainfall events were used for verification. Results showed the model was generally credible and highly correlated with the Pearson correlation coefficient (PEARSON) as its 0.76 simulation result on the soil water and 0.64 as the NASH coefficient on the surface water. This model is not only helpful to understand the characteristics of the process interaction between plant ecology and water in the interaction zone, but also useful to quantify and predict the change of ecological base flow within the wetland habitats caused by the human disturbance, and its impact on the spatial pattern of the wetland plant community.