How to consider floodplains for nitrogen retention in NDR model

Science, Research & Data
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Hi all,
I am working to an ecosystem services assessement in the river Po basin, the larger Italian river. I am interested to run NDR model for nitrogen retention services according future scenarios.

According to a current project, one of the those scenarios considers the hypothesis to create a number of flooded area where the water of the river can flood inside and the nitrogen concentrations could therefore be decreased. I already have experimental measures for nitrogen retention in such areas.

However, it seems that the InVEST water models (e.g. SWY), than need to be run before NDR model to obtain Qf raster, work accounting only the water amount flowing from upstream, and fail to consider the case of water flooding from the river course.
How can I solve this issue in order to assess the nitrogen retention service in such future scenario?
thx
Mattias

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HI @Mattias ,

This is a great question, thanks for posting. I would need to spend a bit of time thinking about how the SWY could be run to provide a better runoff proxy for the NDR model. However, I wonder if you could change your future LULC to have “flood zone” classes that have a very high “eff_n” in the biophysical table. This should help simulate lower nitrogen values reaching the stream.

I’ll reach out to some of our science leads who will hopefully have some better suggestions.

Best,

Doug