Open-source simulation of aquatic ecosystems — water quality, biogeochemistry, and ecology.
This is a page for the Aquatic EcoDynamics research group and associated collaboration network. The organisation hosts the AED model — a modular library for simulating water quality and aquatic ecosystem dynamics — together with its couplings to hydrodynamic host models, the AED Toolkit of supporting software, and repositories from our research and application projects. The AED code is led by researchers at The University of Western Australia and supported by contributions from a global community of researchers and practitioners. The code is released under GPL-3.0 unless noted otherwise.
Alongside the model suite, this organisation hosts repositories from our research projects — estuary and lake studies, teaching materials, dashboards and site-specific model applications. These are working repositories and vary in maturity; the maintained entry points for the models are the repositories listed above.
The AED model itself is a library of organised Fortran code repositories for aquatic biogeochemistry and ecodynamics: oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, organic matter, phytoplankton, zooplankton, pathogens, geochemistry, sediment diagenesis, macrophytes, bivalves and habitat, among others. AED does not compute hydrodynamics itself — it links to a host hydrodynamic model through a defined interface. The same water quality configuration can therefore be moved between various host models:
flowchart LR
subgraph AED["AED library"]
A["libaed-api<br/>host-model interface"]
W["libaed-water<br/>water column modules"]
B["libaed-benthic<br/>benthic modules"]
R["libaed-riparian<br/>riparian modules"]
D["libaed-dev<br/>modules in development"]
X["libaed-demo<br/>example modules"]
end
GLM["GLM<br/>1D lakes & reservoirs"] --- A
FV["TUFLOW-FV<br/>3D estuaries & coasts"] --- A
ELCOM["ELCOM<br/>3D lakes & reservoirs"] --- A
SCHISM["SCHISM<br/>3D cross-scale coastal"] --- A
A --- W
W --- B
W --- R
W --- D
W --- X
A summary of the main models are listed below
| Coupled model | Host hydrodynamics | Typical use | Entry repository |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-AED |  GLM (1D) |
Lakes, reservoirs, ponds, wetlands | glm-aed |
| FV-AED |  TUFLOW-FV (3D finite volume) |
Estuaries, coasts, rivers, floodplains | fv-aed |
| ELCOM-AED |  ELCOM (3D structured) |
Stratified lakes, reservoirs and coasts | elcom-aed |
| SCHISM-AED |  SCHISM (3D unstructured) |
Cross-scale river–estuary–ocean systems | schism-aed |