Surface-water transport of suspended matter through wetland vegetation of the Florida everglades

Abstract

The mobility of waterborne particulate matter plays an important role in the water quality, landscape evolution, and ecology of freshwater wetlands. In this work, we measured the surface-water transport of inorganic particles in a tracer experiment at a wetland in the Florida Everglades. Comparison of the results of this experiment to calculations of a three-dimensional transport model shows that dispersive mixing was small and that rate-limited mass-transfer reactions with emergent vegetation and periphyton substantially reduced water-column concentrations of particles.