Ecohyrological Processes, Environmental Effects, and Integrated Regulation of Wetland Ecosystems

Dear Colleagues,

Wetlands are among the most important ecosystems on Earth and play important multiecological service functions such as providing productivity, regulating climate, purifying water quality, sequestrating carbon, and controlling floods. Wetlands serve as sources, sinks, and transformers of a multitude of chemical, biological, and genetic materials. The conversion of sources and sinks of chemical materials highly depends on ecohydrological processes and microbial degradation. Wetland loss and degradation has occurred on a global scale due to intense human activities, and approximately 50% of wetlands has been lost over the past century. The intense anthropogenic disturbances have greatly degraded wetland functions by draining, dredging, and filling wetlands, modifying the hydrological regime, constructing artificial facilities, and polluting wetland habitats. Wetland habitats have been greatly threatened by the abovementioned human pressures and climate change, which can not only affect primary and secondary productivity, community composition and distribution, and biodiversity, but also impact natural ecohydrological and biogeochemical processes. Meanwhile, the ecosystem services of wetlands have also been degraded due to changing wetland hydrology. Therefore, many protection and restoration projects have been conducted to restore degraded habitats, improve water quality, and control flooding. Wetland restoration is driven by policies such as the Ramsar convention on wetlands of international importance, the Clean Water Act of the US, the Water Framework Directive of the European Union, and others. Hopefully, increasing practices of protection and restoration will develop into an intentional activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of a degraded or destroyed wetlands in more countries.

We invite you to contribute your recent research in relation to understanding ecohydrological processes, environmental effects, and integrated regulation in wetland ecosystems to wetland conservation and management. The potential topics include but not limited to:

1. Hydrological processes in wetlands;
2. Wetland biogeochemistrical processes;
3. Wetland ecological risks;
4. Wetland structures and functions;
5. Environmental pollution in wetlands;
6. Ecohydrological processes in wetlands;
7. Wetlands conservation and restoration;
8. Effects of climate change on wetlands;
9. Ecological service functions in wetlands;
10. Ecological network analysis of wetlands.

Prof. Dr. Junhong Bai
Dr. Tian Xie
Dr. Laibin Huang
Guest Editors

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