Wetland Restoration Planning Approach Based on Interval Fuzzy Linear Programming under Uncertainty.

Yang Zhang,Jing Shen

doi:10.3390/ijerph18189549

Abstract

When planning wetland restoration projects, the planting area allocation and the costs of the restoration measures are two major issues faced by decision makers. In this study, a framework based on the interval fuzzy linear programming (IFLP) method is introduced for the first time to plan wetland restoration projects. The proposed framework can not only effectively deal with interval and fuzzy uncertainties that exist in the planning process of wetland restorations but also handle trade-offs between ecological environment benefits and economic cost. This framework was applied to a real-world wetland restoration planning problem in the northeast of China to verify its validity and examine the credibility of the constraints. The optimized results obtained from the framework that we have developed indicate that higher ecological and social benefits can be obtained with optimal restoration costs after using the wetland restoration decision-making framework. The optimal restoration measure allocation schemes obtained by IFLP under different credibility levels can help decision makers generate a range of alternatives, which can also provide decision suggestions to local managers to generate a satisfactory decision-making plan. Furthermore, a comparison was made between the IFLP model and ILP model in this study. The comparison results indicate that the IFLP model provides more information regarding ecological environment and economic trade-offs between the system objective, certainty, and reliability. This framework provides managers with an effective way to plan wetland restoration projects, while transference of the model may help solve similar problems.

Highlights

Accepted: 7 September 2021Wetlands—transitional zones between aquatic and terrestrial conditions—represent the world’s most productive ecosystems, as do they play a critical role in climate regulation, human health, water resource, and biodiversity, but they provide a series of important ecological services, such as water purification, flood control, and carbon sequestration
The results indicated that this framework has advantages in: (1) obtaining a more credible restoration effect with minimized cost; (2) making trade-offs between ecological environment benefits and economic cost under different satisfaction degrees; (3) taking both ecological benefit and social benefit into account; and (4) addressing uncertainties, which featured as interval numbers and fuzzy-interval numbers in the wetland restoration project
Lower restoration costs can bring higher ecological environment and social benefits after applying a practicable and optimized planting allocation pattern based on the wetland restoration decision-making framework

Summary

Introduction

Accepted: 7 September 2021Wetlands—transitional zones between aquatic and terrestrial conditions—represent the world’s most productive ecosystems, as do they play a critical role in climate regulation, human health, water resource, and biodiversity, but they provide a series of important ecological services, such as water purification, flood control, and carbon sequestration. Protecting natural wetlands with the application of restoration planning (which helps wetlands return to a more natural state) is urgently needed to satisfy the needs of human survival and development. The importance of wetland restoration projects has been emphasized by many studies. The majority of studies on wetland restoration have focused on restoration measures monitoring [10,11,12], restoration effectiveness evaluation [13,14,15,16,17,18], sustainability prediction [19,20,21], and site selection [22,23]. Li et al (2021) investigated the effects of restoration scenarios on estuarine wetland systems and monitored the wetland restoration measures with a hydrodynamic model [11]. Qu et al (2018) developed a Published: 10 September 2021

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion