Independent Study | Floating Seed Beds

Reid Barnett

Cultural eutrophication is one of the most important environmental issues being faced today. As human activities have radically increased the concentration of nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus, in bodies of water, harmful algal and bacterial blooms are becoming increasingly common. These blooms cause red tides, toxic water and massive die-offs of marine ecosystems, ultimately making the waters almost completely devoid of life. This process has massive implications for fisheries, marine biodiversity and climate change.

One way that cultural eutrophication can be stopped is by removing the nutrient pollution from the water directly. The vast majority of current solutions involve large installations and earthenworks projects which do not integrate well into the natural environment and can not be mass produced.

Floating wetland islands are a commonly used technology for removing harmful nitrogen and phosphorus compounds from waterways that can get around many of the negative aspects of nutrient removal systems. These islands work by floating on any body of water and actively locking nutrients away in macroscopic plant biomass. However, these islands are still not perfect; issues include massive labor requirements, high costs, considerable maintenance requirements and poor plant retention. All of these problems can be solved by redesigning these islands around a textile-based system.

My project looked at how a textile-based floating wetland island can be implemented and which textile parameters are important in ensuring an effective end product. By conducting growth experiments with different fabrics of varying dominant hole size and seed placement, a predictive statistical model can be developed to better understand the ideal characteristics of the cladding material for the textile-based wetland islands. Determining these characteristics will help these textile-based wetland islands to not only perform as well as their traditional counterparts, but also overcome their shortcomings. The continuation of this project can hopefully lead to a textile-based wetland island that is optimally designed, and which can be used all over the world to combat cultural eutrophication to bring life back to our destroyed aquatic environments.