Evolutionary Algorithm for Water Storage Forecasting Response to Climate Change with Small Data Sets: The Wolonghu Wetland, China

A novel genetic programming (GP) technique, a new method of evolutionary algorithms, was applied to a small data set to predict the water storage of Wolonghu wetland in response to the climate change in the northeastern part of China. Fourteen years (1993-2006) of annual water storage and climatic data of the wetland were used for model training and testing. Results of simulations and predictions illustrate a good fit between calculated water storage and observed values (mean absolute percent error = 9.47, r = 0.99). By comparison, a multilayer perceptron method (a popular artificial neural network model) and Grey theory model with the same data set were applied for performance estimation. It was found that GP technique had better performance than the other two methods, in both the simulation step and the predicting phase. The case study confirms that GP method is a promising way for wetland managers to make a quick estimation of fluctuations of water storage in some wetlands under the limitation of a small data set.