Abstract
Constructed wetlands have been popular in ecological engineering regime; yet, modeling the physical, chemical,
and biological processes within these wetlands is a long-standing challenge in the past decades. In concert with
our field-scale pilot testing of a new-generation subsurface upflow wetland (SUW) system, this article highlights
an advancement of modeling the SUW system with a layer-structured compartmental simulation model. This is
the first wetland model of its kind to address the complexity between plant nutrient uptake and medium
sorption. Such a system dynamics model using STELLA as a means for a graphical formulation was applied to
illustrate the essential mechanism of the nitrification and denitrification processes within a sorption mediumbased
SUW system, which can be recognized as one of the major passive on-site wastewater treatment technologies
in this decade. Model calibration and validation received fairly good R-squared values of 0.9998 and
0.9644, respectively. Such good agreement with the measured data confirms that the developed system dynamics
model may provide a reliable tool for designing this particular type of constructed wetland. This work
also entails the significant movement of linking green building with green infrastructure as part of the urbanization
for nature.
Key words: constructed wetlands, nutrient control, septic effluent, subsurface upflow, system dynamics modell