Understand the impacts of wetland restoration on peak flow and baseflow by coupling hydrologic and hydrodynamic models

Wetlands as the earth's kidneys provides various ecosystem services, such as absorbing pollutants, purifying freshwater, providing habitats for diverse ecosystems, sustaining species richness and biodiversity. From hydrologic perspective, wetlands can store storm-flood water in flooding seasons and release it afterwards, which will reduce flood peaks and reshape hydrograph. Therefore, as a green infrastructure and natural capital, wetlands provides a competent alternative to manage water resources in a green way, with potential to replace the widely criticized traditional gray infrastructure (i.e. dams and dikes) in certain cases. However, there are few systematic scientific tools to support our decision-making on site selection and allow us to quantitatively investigate the impacts of restored wetlands on hydrological process, not only in local scale but also in the view of entire catchment. In this study, we employed a topographic index, HAND (the Height Above the Nearest Drainage), to support our decision on potential site selection. Subsequently, a hydrological model (VIC, Variable Infiltration Capacity) was coupled with a macro-scale hydrodynamic model (CaMa-Flood, Catchment-Based Macro-scale Floodplain) to simulate the impact of wetland restoration on flood peaks and baseflow. The results demonstrated that topographic information is an essential factor to select wetland restoration location. Different reaches, wetlands area and the change of roughness coefficient should be taken into account while evaluating the impacts of wetland restoration. The simulated results also clearly illustrated that wetland restoration will increase the local storage and decrease the downstream peak flow which is beneficial for flood prevention. However, its impact on baseflow is ambiguous. Theoretically, restored wetlands will increase the baseflow due to the slower release of the stored flood water, but the increase of wetlands area may also increase the actual evaporation, which probably result in the slightly decrease of baseflow.