Integration of wetland modules into the watershed hydrological model: assessment of simulation accuracy

Watershed hydrological modelling provides a methodology to evaluate the effects of wetlands on stream flow and watershed hydrology. In this study,the PHYSITEL/HYDROTEL modelling platform was used to assess the added-value of specific isolated wetland and riparian wetland modules. To achieve this goal,two sets of simulations were performed (with and without wetland modules) to assess the capacity of the modelling platform with respect to two river segments of the Nenjiang River Basin,Northeast China. The results showed that integration of specific wetland modules can improve the performance of HYDROTEL to simulate both stream flows and effects of wetlands watershed hydrology. During the calibration and validation periods,Nash-Sutcliffe and Kling-Gupta efficiency improved 3.08% and 4.64% and percent bias root and mean squared error decreased 12.72% and 55.93% as a result of the integration of wetland modules,respectively. This explicit assessment framework could be applied to study the effect of wetland restauration and recovery projects on watershed hydrology.