Abstract

Growth of aquatic plants growth in river systems responds to phosphorus enrichment and creates fluctuations in dissolved oxygen. Most aquatic plant models simulate the growth of a single generalized specie and therefore cannot account for the wide variability in growth patterns shown by differing species. ECOL, an aquatic plant growth model developed in the late 1970s, was incorporated into the Grand River Simulation Model (GRSM) to model the growth of the three main plant species found in the Grand River watershed: Cladophora glomerata, Potamogeton pectinatus and Myriophyllum spicatum. ECOL calculates plant uptake of phosphorus, biomass production and loss, and the resulting production and consumption of dissolved oxygen (DO), using a 2 h time step.

New algorithms to improve the sub-models in ECOL for light, temperature and phosphorus were developed and tested in this study. The present work evaluated and corrected sources of error in GRSM96, recalibrated the improved model and identified and quantified remaining weaknesses. The resulting model, GRSM98AH, has an average error between computed and observed DO of 19.6%, which was regarded as satisfactory.

This paper is only available in PDF Format:

  View full text PDF