Innovative Stormwater Floating Islands as Wetland Plant Nurseries

摘要

Floating islands are being introduced across the United States and the developed world as a means of adding vegetated islands in open water to fix and transform nutrients and other pollutants in retention ponds and other stormwater practices with open water. Some floating islands are composed of a floating plastic mesh/matrix into which holes are cut to accept wetland plants. As the plants grow and mature the plastic mesh becomes a unified mass of floating wetland plant vegetation composed of plant stems, crowns, and root systems. This paper introduces a different approach to stormwater floating islands with the use of off-the-shelf materials to build modular floating wetland islands that are simple to build and manipulate. The base unit of the island is a small rectangular floating styrofoam plant flat which is filled with a lightweight soil-less media. Wetland plants can be established using plant plugs or seed. The modular islands can be left as static islands or used to propagate wetland plants. Data will be presented on nutrient removal by plant harvest, and case studies will be presented of harvest and re-use of wetland plants grown in the modular floating wetland islands.