Our team is using constructed floating wetlands primarily to assess their ability to remove contaminants like oil after a spill. We are exploring the use of floating wetlands and associated microorganisms on their roots to enhance biodegradation of freshwater oil spills. Researchers are working to explore changes to the microbial community upon exposure to oil to see if there are organisms that can degrade oil compounds.

There has been some work done by one of our scientists, Richard Groshans, using constructed floating wetlands on one of our long-running whole lake experiments on algal blooms to see how much phosphorus (the key ingredient in algal blooms) they can remove from the lake, though I believe this work has not yet been published (https://www.iisd.org/articles/video/how-build-floating-wetland, https://www.iisd.org/publications/guide/floating-treatment-wetlands-keeping-our-fresh-water-clean-and-healthy ).

Richard has also done considerable research on the harvesting of emergent macrophytes from ephemeral wetlands as an energy source, which has the added benefit of removing nutrients