Aerated treatment wetlands have become an increasingly recognized technology for treating wastewaters from domestic and various industrial origins. To date, treatment wetland aeration is provided by air pumps which require access to the energy grid. The requirement for electricity increases the ecological footprint of an aerated wetland and limits the application of this technology to areas with centralized electrical infrastructure. Wind power offers another possibility as a driver for wetland aeration, but its use for this purpose has not yet been investigated. This paper reports the first experimental trial using a simple wind-driven air pump to replace the conventional electric air blowers of an aerated horizontal subsurface flow wetland. The wind-driven air pump was connected to a two-year old horizontal flow aerated wetland which had been in continuous (24 h) aeration since startup. The wind-driven aeration system functioned, however it was not specifically adapted to wetland aeration. As a result, treatment performance decreased compared to prior continuous aeration. Inconsistent wind speed at the site may have resulted in insufficient pressure within the aeration manifold, resulting in insufficient air supply to the wetland. This paper discusses the lessons learned during the experiment.

An advanced type of constructed wetland (CW) called an engineered wetland (EW) has been developed which allows more efficient removals of contaminants from wastewaters and stormwaters at rates in many cases an order of magnitude higher than those achievable with ordinary CWs. In one type of advanced aerobic EW, the wastewater being treated flows sub-surface (SSF) beneath an aggregate substrate which is aerated mechanically from below. This ecotechnology allows very much higher removals (>95%) of those wastewater contaminants amenable to aerobic treatment (e.g., BOD, ammonia). A large 1.9 ha EW system treating glycol-contaminated water is now operating at Buffalo Niagara International Airport (BNIA) in upper New York State, USA. This system, which is successfully treating glycol-contaminated stormwater runoff and spent glycol from cold weather aircraft deicing activities, involves four very large aerated EW cells and is capable of treating up to 4,620 m³/d of glycol-contaminated water containing up to 4,535 kg/d of BOD (the BOD-equivalent of a city of 50,000 people), even in the coldest weather.

The once-extensive coastal forested wetlands (CFWs) of the Mississippi River Delta (MRD) are declining under the combined pressures of pervasive hydrologic change, unregulated harvesting, relative water level rise (due to the combination of geological subsidence and sea-level rise—SLR), and climate change. We synthesize here over 50 years of research conducted in the MRD to examine the history of the CFWs and their management, their ecosystem functions and services, and the nature, extent, and severity of ongoing changes. Seedling recruitment failure and increasing salinity levels are the most immediate threats to forest persistence, necessitating management that restores hydrologic function and sediment and nutrient supply to allow seedling survival and minimizes saltwater intrusion. Collectively, the evidence indicates that managed inflows can bolster accretion and sustain forest function, and long-term resilience requires hydrologic restoration at landscape scales coupled with site-level actions that secure recruitment and address local degradation trajectories. These include freshwater and sediment introduction, protection from herbivory, and, in some cases, planting. Our research findings have important implications for worldwide CFWs, and tidal freshwater ecosystems in general, which occur mainly in tropical deltas.