🌾 Wetland Water Filtration & Flood Buffer Lab (2D)

This 2D companion strips the 3D wetland-vs-paved-channel comparison down to a top-down cross-section built for reading the numbers rather than orbiting a scene. Two lanes run left to right from the same source: sediment- and nutrient-laden particles cross the wetland lane at full speed until they hit the vegetated zone, where flow speed drops sharply and each particle has a per-frame chance to settle its sediment and steadily lose nutrients to nearby roots; the paved lane has no such zone, so its particles arrive downstream exactly as dirty as they left. A separate "sponge" reservoir behind the wetland lane absorbs the excess of any storm pulse above baseline flow and releases it slowly, while the paved lane's outflow tracks the pulse almost instantly — trigger a storm and the live hydrograph at the bottom makes the difference between a flattened, delayed wetland peak and a sharp paved-channel spike immediately visible.