Water is Life – Floating Wetlands

“Water is life” may sound passé, yet it is a most profound fact. Life follows water, whether inside or outside our bodies; in deserts; rainforests; salt or freshwater; in soil or in trees or on rocks on land or in the sky.

Floating Wetlands are fascinating and beautiful technologies, capable of offering extensive environmental services that may be applied across a wide range of scenarios. They can be applied as aesthetic additions, a means of injecting all the benefits of verdant plantings into water bodies, or functional and targeted planting solutions to commercial or public realm wetlands requiring assistance to deal with poor water quality. Additionally, Floating Wetlands may become part of revegetation projects or ecological works, establishing healthy waterways, creating habitats as permanent or temporary support for vegetation establishment or fauna such as waterfowl, turtles, fish and all manner of aquatic life.

These technologies can be integrated into productive farm systems seeking additional productivity or enhanced water quality management, whilst creating multiple cropping systems; spawning sites for fish production; water processing and filtering solutions; nutrient removal; shading, algae management and erosion control; targeted silt deposition for ease of management to control water flow, etc.

Consequently, Floating Wetlands offer significant benefits in scenarios where water bodies are struggling with toxicities, nutrient imbalances or impaired vegetation establishment, such as polluted dams or ponds, discarded quarries or water bodies where blue-green algae or thermal inversion or eutrophication may be ongoing challenges.

Floating wetlands may become vegetated bridges across waterways for fauna and flora to traverse, nest on or seek shelter within, whilst root systems and biofilms below water level simultaneously offer water quality management solutions.

Each floating wetland may function as nuclei from which indigenous aquatic or semi-aquatic species seed surrounding water edges, thus boosting revegetation and species diversity, whilst creating habitat and refugia for sensitive fauna requiring reprieve or resting or nesting sites away from land-based predators or human activity.

How we apply such technologies, requires an understanding of the dynamic nature of water and the complex interactions of ecological systems.

The Dynamic Nature of Water

All chemicals, including the nutrition and building blocks our bodies comprise and rely upon for ongoing growth and development, require water as the capture and transport media outside and within our bodies. Water transports chemicals out of soils, plants and animals, holds them in solution and allows them to be transported into our bodies to use to sustain, maintain, develop and grow and to fuel our movement. Water within our bodies and individual cells, is the media our circulatory systems use to transport minerals and nutrients to where it is needed, furthermore, water is a regulatory chemical used to dilute or increase nutrient concentrations, thus producing healthy balances and reducing toxicities due to over-concentration.

The same applies outside our bodies, in terms of plants accessing nutrients, minerals and the building blocks of life, including developing photosynthesis, only once water is present to absorb, hold, chemically balance and move chemicals to be wielded for the formation and support processes of life. Considering we eat plants and animals, and depend upon them within healthy ecologies, to create, filter and process the air we breathe, the fact that water is life, becomes an ever more important factor of life. Plants invariably regulate the water we drink and absorb into our bodies, via the hydrological cycles that the biosphere surrounding Earth, hosts.

We often find water presents a dual condition, being the generator of life and the media through which the demise of life ensues. All the minerals and nutrients that enrich our lives, transition into toxicities when their concentrations accumulate and become unnaturally high. Humans collect and transport extremely high volumes of nutrients and chemicals across the Earth, and due to limited wisdom, knowledge or expertise, some humans and industries often use or discard such resources in unhealthily high concentrations or in sufficiently large volumes, to overwhelm living systems in water and on land.

Maintaining Balance

Human patterns of aggressive colonisation of the Earth, frequently encompass the expansion over large areas of land, leading to the demolition of habitats that evolved as natural processing nuclei or nexus points for the world's minerals, nutrients and life-supporting resources.

Prior to human dominance, these resources were incorporated into expansive and species diverse habitats, achieving balances that were supportive of healthy life and the development of life. These evolutionary processes expanded and contracted in balance with available resources. Thus, the removal of these habitats and the increased concentration of resources on ever smaller parcels of land and water, due to human-centric endevours, leads to increasing pressure on neighbouring and downstream natural and artificial systems to cope with toxicities.

One of the first areas we observe toxicities in is water, the natural transport media of chemicals. This means the life that inhabits water bodies often experiences chemical stress and toxicities before lifeforms that inhabit land, develop symptoms. By the time land-based life observes toxicity stress, it often means such toxicities have already overwhelmed water sources, whether that be water that is out of sight from humans, in soils or clearly visible water in dams, ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, etc.

Water is the basis of life and healthy water is a resource that should be treasured.

It is here that floating wetlands offer an opportunity, as a technology, to support healthy water bodies, rehabilitate challenged conditions and buffer healthy waterways against potential toxicities and imbalances.

Water Quality Close to Home

Water within the urban sphere is often challenged by fertilisers, herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides applied on farms, recreation facilities and gardens. Water used on farms where more animals are held than the local environment can support, often leads to toxic organic and inorganic chemicals flowing into water and collecting in soils or waterways. The same applies to pollutants from petrol and diesel-based vehicles, general urban machinery and processes that washing off roads and drains into waterways.

Similarly, mining and quarrying often generate large depressions in the Earth or mounds of concentrated minerals and nutrients pulled up from deep below the soils of the biosphere. Rain picks up chemicals left behind in soils or from rock processing, draining and collecting into land-locked water bodies with minimal supportive vegetation to help generate ecologies capable of assisting with water remediation.

Water flows within and from golf courses, farms, public parks and residential waterways are often, similarly, overburdened.

There are wonderful examples of beautifully vegetated water bodies as part of residential developments, where natural succession towards healthy waterways is underway, yet this process requires time to integrate and for life to populate across sufficient diversity to cater for all trophic levels of energy processing, to become resilient and adaptable. Trophic levels are the layers of transition and movement of energy (resources) from microscopic to macroscopic scales, each jump upwards from bacteria to fungi, onwards to plants, animals, forests to entire biomes, require specific species to become linked in chains of energy transfer, often with one eating the other and thus absorbing and transitioning the resources held with each other’s bodies.

These integrated chains of energy absorption and transfer between species and populations of species become what we term ‘ecologies’, which are in a manner living filters and akin to tissues, veins and arteries within the larger collective of life encompassing Earth.

Each species and the larger trophic level each is part of, is connected by water, the universal transport media for chemicals through life.

Sometimes, such living systems struggle due to human contact attrition, with additional stressors causing ecological failures, often observed within water bodies such as ponds, dams, lakes, streams and rivers.

This damage and imbalance creeps onwards into groundwater and onto land or may develop in reverse, should the toxic accumulation originate on land first.

There are generally two requirements to remediate this, one is to treat the cause at the source, to halt the ongoing production of toxicities and to stem the flow of toxicities through systems. The other is to strengthen the surrounding ecologies to create buffers to assist in maximising biological processing of chemicals to retain the status below toxic levels. Naturally, both options are required to create lasting and resilient change and a capacity to maintain balance.

Understanding the Interplay and Flow between Resources and Toxicities

Floating wetlands, as technologies, simultaneously present opportunities to insert stop-gaps to halt and treat imbalances within water bodies. How to apply these technologies appropriately, requires understanding the interplay and flow of resources into, through and out of water.

Water, nutrients, temperature and light create life as each of these are powerful resources.

Similarly, either one of these inputs can alter the nature of the relationship between the others, creating ripples of cause and effect that develop imbalances within living systems.

High light can increase temperature whilst water can conduct heat, and thus warmth, light and moisture can set the capacity of a living system to function or fail. Consistently warm, tropical, conditions often allow plants to continually grow, thus if one were to add moisture then growth may be accelerated, leading to a need for nutrients. Adding nutrients to a warm and moist environment can lead to amplified growth rates.

Yet, if all these inputs are increased except for one, such as light, the low light reduces plant growth whilst nutrients are left to continue accumulating. Accumulated nutrients that are not consistently absorbed into living systems and transitioned into growth (i.e. diluted into- and held within- living tissues), become toxic.

A classic example is synthetic fertiliser. All fertilisers that are not organic, are concentrated salts. If we add salt to water, it becomes unpalatable and leads to the drinker feeling persistent thirst. Thirst is a feedback impulse to drink water and thus dilute accumulated salts. When water is saturated with salts, the water can no longer rebalance the additional salts and thus the water system becomes toxic. Consequently, the living system hosting the water, starts dying and the surrounding soils become toxic as salts remain behind as water evaporates.

Toxicities are not limited to synthetic fertilisers as even organic nutrient accumulations such as urea or manure from farms that are over-stocked with cows or sheep, etc. can accumulate to toxic levels if farming practices do not factor in the natural balances the local environment can manage. Too many animals left grazing in a single area, will eventually degrade the hard-working plants within the paddock and leave urine and manure to accumulate beyond what the local area can absorb and hold within bacteria, fungal, plant and animal bodies. This excess becomes toxic, eventually leading to soils becoming saturated with toxicities, with rain on soils picking up the nutrients which then drain into ponds, damns, lakes and water ways, spreading the toxicities downstream.

In some cases, heavy metals may be released from soils and rocks by quarrying or mining operations, requiring specific vegetation applications to extract heavy metals from the surrounding water bodies, allowing for off-site processing, until balances are achieved and natural systems are restored.

It is self-explanatory that poisons such as insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides, grouped as biocides, will kill life. Each trophic level, from microscopic bacteria and fungi to plants (including weeds) and insects (including pests) and animals (including feral animals and humans) are all vital constituents of the interconnected web of life that evolved as a means of processing resources, minerals and nutrients on Earth. Killing any part of this web, creates failure points within the system, leading to stress being passed to the next in line along the trophic levels of energy flow. This leads to entire system degradation, in time.

Floating Wetland Solutions

Floating wetlands offer the opportunity to introduce life into new and existing systems, reducing stressors that may be in place due to arising toxicities. Floating wetlands are a means of expanding upon the capacity of the local ecology to process resources towards maintaining balance.

As discussed, we can manage resource and toxicity processing in water bodies, by moderating light, temperature, nutrients and water flow.

Algae are a vital group of plants that function as water processing and regulating solutions. Where light and nutrients are in abundance, algae flourish. They are one of the first teams to arrive, following bacteria, to process excess nutrients and convert them into vegetation.

This integrates free nutrients into organic forms, thus cleaning water and returning chemical balance to the water body.

Where nutrients are repeatedly inserted into water, algae growth may become intense, thus algae function as indicator species of degrees of balance and imbalance. Part of the process pertains to how algae respond with aggressive growth, which is directly proportionate to the amount of nutrients being added to the water.

Following this, algae may die and descend as dead vegetation to the bottom of water bodies, where their decomposition causes the water to become anaerobic, a result of nutrient dumping and release, leading to a chain of events of natural trophic processing until bacteria and larger plants and aquatic life can process the excess nutrients and transport it away, thus diluting the toxicity to tolerable levels.

For humans, this process may not be a comfortable process to experience as water bodies may become unsuitable for drinking or general use and carry an odour of decomposition until the toxicity is remedied which may take a prolonged time for the natural balances to return.

Floating wetlands can expedite this remediation by adding additional vegetation to the water body, with roots and bacterial biofilms around roots, bolstering bacterial processing, removing excessive nutrients from the water and reducing algae die-off. Thus, halting denitrification and anaerobic conditions developing.

Floating wetlands are also physical shading solutions, reducing sunlight entering or heating water bodies which are challenged by excessive heating, which exacerbates algae growth (note the discussion regarding light, water, nutrient and temperature balances).

Therefore, the beneficial impacts of floating wetlands are multi-fold and cumulative, addressing multiple impacts simultaneously.

A similar approach to holistic system design can be applied to a range of challenges, whereby floating wetlands may be strategically positioned to regulate water inflow, current dynamics, silt (nutrients held in solution and moved via water currents) deposition into target zones and shading of water columns.

Fytogreens Modular System

Fytogreens Floating Wetland modules can be joined to generate large floating wetland complexes, mosaics, strategic columns or a wide range of configurations to suit each sites unique requirement. The scaling of floating wetlands depends upon the size of the water body and the extent of the challenges present, thus percentage coverage and vegetation functioning, require balancing with the acuteness of water conditions, toxicities, etc.

With this in mind, floating wetlands may be designed to maximise aesthetic benefit or habitat production. The panels intermesh, allowing foliage to expand seamlessly between modules. The outer perimeter of each panel has a felt wrapping that extends into the water column, thus allowing for wicking of moisture, supporting edge plantings to reach into water surrounding the wetland, to float or root into the water column, thus generating a fully vegetated aesthetic, in time.

Waterfowl are drawn to the edges and surrounds of floating wetlands, to rest and observe for predators, whilst nesting within niches of the densely vegetated interior plantings. A range of groundcovers, tussocks, forbs and shrubs allow for foliage stratification. This is an ideal combination of growth forms and diversity to create requisite niches to accommodate most wetland fauna and to regulate temperature and humidity.

Vegetated floating wetlands offer protection as well as food sources for fauna, including aquatic species such as fish and amphibians, with root systems of plants extending into the water column, penetrating to varying depths pending species selections. This services multiple temperature and light zones, creating diverse biofilms capable of processing water and feeding a range of micro-fauna including juvenile fish and invertebrates such as shrimp.

Hence, a floating wetland creates a nucleus for spawning and refugia for newly hatched aquatic species, across a diverse range of trophic levels.

These mobile aquatic nurseries are invaluable resources to establish new wetlands or bolster existing wetlands, assisting in generating increased biodiversity and ecological services.
Vegetation can be specifically selected to aid the Floating Wetlands to seed onto surrounding water body perimeters, thus expanding upon shore-line establishment and increase species diversity. The influence of Floating wetlands is therefore expansive.

The weight-bearing capacity of Fytogreens floating wetland modules is sufficient to support the weight of maintenance personnel, allowing staff to walk across modules to conduct observations, weed control, planting and general management practices. Modules can transition from highly positively buoyant to moderately buoyant, thus allowing for the creation of various aquatic and semi-aquatic communities requiring specific water depths.

Aquatic systems are highly complex, with climate and local weather as well as unique site conditions influencing establishment and planting outcomes. Each site requires tailored analysis to ensure appropriate design and application processes are applied. Seasonal variations certainly do play a role in this, as does gradual species transitioning as wetlands mature.

Fytogreen is expanding upon saline water solutions, aiding with coastal and marine or brackish water ecological support. This is a dynamic space, receiving notable attention.

Floating wetland technology is developing as we continually address aquatic ecological dynamics. From water quality management to aquaculture and habitat production, the potential of floating wetland technologies is significant, which is vital considering the growing challenges faced within the urban sphere.