Ground water levels of a developing wetland—implications for water management goals

Decreased water tables also enable recharge by local precipitation giving rise to so-called “rainfalldominant” zones that interfere with the inflowing deeper regional groundwater, as it was already indicated above (Fig. 1). Therefore, the properties of water in the uppermost soil layers may temporarily be rainfall-like (e.g. electrical conductivity and

1 INTRODUCTION

Wetland habitats and their unique vegetation are threatened by human activities all over the world (Schot et al. 2004). Among the many threatened vegetation types, low-productive fen meadows are particularly known for species richness, thus giving it a high priority from the viewpoint of biodiversity conservation (Grygoruk et al. 2015). The species richness of fen meadow vegetation is closely related to the availability of nutrient-poor groundwater (Wheeler & Shaw 1995, Dąbrowski et al. 2015).