Crude oil pollution of soil is a serious environmental issue, and bioremediation using plants and microorganisms is a natural and sustainable method for its restoration. Pot incubation of a two-factor randomized block (plants with two levels, and crude oil with three levels) was designed to investigate the rhizosphere bacterial community of Suaeda salsa (L.) Pall. Crude oil contamination of soil was studied at different levels: 2 g/kg (low), 4 g/kg (medium), and 6 g/kg (high) levels. In this study, the physicochemical properties of the collected rhizosphere soil were analyzed. Moreover, the soil bacteria were further identified using the 16S rRNA gene. The effects of S. salsa and crude oil and their interaction on the physiochemical properties of the soil and crude oil degradation were found to be significant. Crude oil significantly influenced the diversity and evenness of bacteria, while the effects of S. salsa and interaction with crude oil were not significant. Proteobacteria were found to be dominant at the phylum level. Meanwhile, at the genera level, Saccharibacteria and Alcanivorax increased significantly in the low and medium contamination treatment groups with S. salsa, whereas Saccharibacteria and Desulfuromonas were prevalent in the high contamination treatment group. High crude oil contamination led to a significant decrease in the bacterial diversity in soil, while the effects of S. salsa and its interaction were not significant. Despite the highest abundance of crude oil degradation bacteria, S. salsa reduced crude oil degradation bacteria and increased bacteria related to sulfur, phosphorus, and nitrogen cycling in the low and high contamination group, whereas the opposite effect was observed for the medium contamination treatment group. The abundance of most crude oil degradation bacteria is negatively correlated with crude oil content. Nitrogen cycling bacteria are sensitive to the total nitrogen, total phosphorus, ammonia nitrogen, and nitrate nitrogen, and pH of the soil. Sulfur cycling bacteria are sensitive to aromatic hydrocarbons, saturated hydrocarbons, and asphaltene in soil. This research is helpful for further studying the mechanism of synergistic degradation by S. salsa and bacteria.

Nutrient removal in tidal flow constructed wetlands (TF-CW) is a complex series of nonlinear multi-parameter interactions. We simulated three tidal flow systems and a continuous vertical flow system filled with synthetic wastewater and compared the influent and effluent concentrations to examine (1) nutrient removal in artificial TF-CWs, and (2) the ability of a backpropagation (BP) artificial neural network to predict nutrient removal. The nutrient removal rates were higher under tidal flow when the idle/reaction time was two, and reached 90 ± 3%, 99 ± 1%, and 58 ± 13% for total nitrogen (TN), ammonium nitrogen (NH₄⁺-N), and total phosphorus (TP), respectively. The main influences on nutrient removal for each scenario were identified by redundancy analysis and were input into the model to train and verify the pollutant effluent concentrations. Comparison of the actual and model-predicted effluent concentrations showed that the model predictions were good. The predicted and actual values were correlated and the margin of error was small. The BP neural network fitted best to TP, with an R² of 0.90. The R² values of TN, NH₄⁺-N, and nitrate nitrogen (NO₃⁻-N) were 0.67, 0.73, and 0.69, respectively.

From the perspective of vegetation density, this research studies the influence of vegetation on turbulence characteristics and Reynolds shear stress in partly vegetated channel via a series of experiments. Natural reed is employed to simulate the emergent vegetation in rivers. Different vegetation densities including vegetated and unvegetated cases are considered in the research. The results of the research demonstrate that emergent vegetation may force the water flowing from vegetated areas to unvegetated areas and the forcing intensity increases with reed density. It is also found that the relative turbulence intensity declines along the vegetated channel in the direction of flow. Vegetation is found to reduce the total-average Reynolds shear stress therefore reduce the soil erosion. However, the Reynolds shear stress reduction is found disproportional to the vegetation density, and an optimal vegetation density range is quantitatively determined in the research. The findings of the research are significant to the practice of river ecological restoration.

In this research, the vegetation height and a concept of relative submergence are adapted to experimentally investigate the effects of rigid submerged vegetation on flow structure. The results reveal that the relative submergence presents decreasing trend along the submerged vegetation section and the average relative submergence follows a power functional decreasing relationship regarding to the increase of vegetation height. After the exit of vegetation block, the water depths for the vegetated cases resume to the level and trend of the case without vegetation. The differences between the maximum and minimum water depths for the submerged cases follow a linear relationship with vegetation height and a negative power functional relationship with the average relative submergence, with which, the raised water depths due to rigid submerged vegetation can be predicted under similar hydraulic and vegetation conditions to the present research. Due to the retardance of vegetation block, the differences between the maximum and minimum flow velocities increase with the vegetation height as the maximum values change slightly and the minimum values decrease continuously. The findings of the research may improve the comprehensive understandings of open channel hydraulic behaviors affected by rigid submerged vegetation and give some guidance to the river ecological restorations.

The research investigates synchronizing dynamics of three nonidentical ecological systems, one of which is invaded by an exterior top predator. For studying the effects of species invasion in the synchronizing dynamics, combination synchronization of one drive system and two response systems is designed: the ecological system with species invasion taken as drive system, and the other ecological systems as response systems. Using active backstepping design, the conditions for achievement of combination synchronization are derived. Under the conditions, numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the synchronizing dynamics of ecological systems under species invasion. The results suggest that mechanism of synchronization plays an important role in determining chaos when ecological systems are interacting with each other.