Open-source simulation of aquatic ecosystems — water quality, biogeochemistry, and ecology.
We are the Aquatic EcoDynamics research group at The University of Western Australia. This 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 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 |