Dear Günter,

Thanks for making us aware of this interesting paper on number and size distribution of treatment wetlands in Austria which you have published. It must have been a lot of work to get all this data together all over Austria! You must have had some capable students to help you.

I see in your methods section how it was done:

Data have been collected from the water information systems of the seven federal states (Carinthia, Lower Austria, Salzburg, Styria, Tyrol, Upper Austria, and Vorarlberg), which is available online for the public. Data for the remaining two federal states with a low number of small WWTPs (Burgenland and Vienna) have been received from the responsible persons at the federal governments. Data collected for each treatment plant included design size, treatment technology, date of commissioning, etc. As data are recorded slightly differently in all federal states, especially the categorising of the applied technology had to be checked and made uniform.

I'll attach the pdf file to this post temporarily if anyone is interested in the full paper:

As I found this data so relevant and practical, I have also added a bit from this paper to the Wikipedia article about constructed wetlands. I've tried to make it understandable and relevant for laypersons, see here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_wetland#Austria

Examples

Austria

The total number of constructed wetlands in Austria is 5,450 (in 2015).[14] Due to legal requirements (nitrification), only vertical flow constructed wetlands are implemented in Austria as they achieve better nitrification performance than horizontal flow constructed wetlands. Only about 100 of these constructed wetlands have a design size of 50 population equivalents or more. The remaining 5,350 treatment plants are smaller than that.[14]

(with Wikipedia's referencing tool, getting the reference in the right format is really easy as one just needs to enter the DOI and the rest is generated automatically; so it really doesn't take long)

To everyone: if you've published a good paper that contains information relevant also for the interested wider public, how about inserting key information plus your reference also into the relevant Wikipedia article? It's a good way to improve Wikipedia and to ensure more people know about your paper.

Regards,
Elisabeth

We did a survey on number and size distribution of treatment wetlands in Austria.

Key facts:
- In Austria, 1,840 wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) with design size >50 population equivalent (PE) serve about 95% of the population (out of those WWTPs 1,300 WWTPs have design size 51–500 PE)
- The remaining 5% of the population are served with WWTPs with design size <50 PE or have a cesspit.
- In Austria there are 27,400 WWTPs with design size <50 PE, respectively.
- The total number of treatment wetlands implemented in Austria is 5,450. Due to legal requirements (nitrification), only vertical flow wetlands are implemented in Austria.
- From the 5,450 treatment wetlands, about 100 are of design size larger than 50 PE and about 2,800 treatment wetlands have a design size of 5–10 PE.
- The peak of wetland implementation was in the years 2007–2011 with 2,200 implemented systems in 5 years.

Reference: Langergraber, G., Weissenbacher, N. (2017): Survey on number and size distribution of treatment wetlands in Austria. Water Sci Technol 75(10), 2309-2315, doi: 10.2166/wst.2017.112.
Link to the abstract: wst.iwaponline.com/content/75/10/2309