HESS Hydrology and Earth System Sciences HESS Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 1607-7938 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/hess-18-2113-2014 Development of a zoning-based environmental–ecological coupled model for lakes: a case study of Baiyangdian Lake in northern China Zhao Y. W. 1 Xu M. J. 2 Xu F. 3 Wu S. R. 1 Yin X. A. 1 State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, Ministry of Environmental Protection, Nanjing, 210042, China Beijing Municipal Research Institute of Environmental Protection, Beijing, 100037, China 10 06 2014 18 6 2113 2126 Copyright: © 2014 Y. W. Zhao et al. 2014 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/18/2113/2014/hess-18-2113-2014.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/18/2113/2014/hess-18-2113-2014.pdf

Environmental/ecological models are widely used for lake management as they provide a means to understand physical, chemical, and biological processes in highly complex ecosystems. Most research has focused on the development of environmental (water quality) and ecological models, separately. Limited studies were developed to couple the two models, and in these limited coupled models, a lake was regarded as a whole for analysis (i.e. considering the lake to be one well-mixed box), which is appropriate for small-scale lakes but is not sufficient to capture spatial variations within middle-scale or large-scale lakes. In response to this problem, this paper seeks to establish a zoning-based environmental–ecological coupled model for a lake. Hierarchical cluster analysis was adopted to determine the number of zones in a given lake based on hydrological, water quality, and ecological data analysis. The MIKE 21 model was used to construct 2-D hydrodynamics and water quality simulations. STELLA software was used to create a lake ecological model that can simulate the spatial variations of ecological condition based on flow field distribution results generated by MIKE 21. Baiyangdian Lake, the largest freshwater lake in northern China, was adopted as the study case. The results showed that the new model is promising for predicting spatial variations of ecological conditions in response to changes in lake water quantity and quality, and could be useful for lake management.

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