Optimization of Synergistic Water Resources, Water Environment, and Water Ecology Remediation and Restoration Project: Application in the Jinshan Lake Basin

The concept of synergistic water resources, water environment, water ecology remediation, and restoration (3WRR) is essential for addressing the interlinked challenges of water scarcity, pollution, and ecological degradation. An intelligent platform of remediation and restoration project optimization was developed, integrating multi-source data fusion, a coupled air–land–water model, and dynamic decision optimization to support 3WRR in river basins. Applied to the Jinshan Lake Basin (JLB) in China’s Greater Bay Area, the platform assessed 894 scenarios encompassing diverse remediation and restoration plans, including point/non-point source reduction, sediment dredging, recycled water reuse, ecological water replenishment, and sluice gate control, accounting for inter-annual meteorological variability. The results reveal that source control alone (95% reduction in point and non-point loads) leads to limited improvement, achieving less than 2% compliance with Class IV water quality standards in tributaries. Integrated engineering–ecological interventions, combining sediment dredging with high-flow replenishment from the Xizhijiang River (26.1 m3/s), increases compliance days of Class IV water quality standards by 10–51 days. Concerning the lake plans, including sluice regulation and large-volume water exchange, the lake area met the Class IV standard for COD, NH3-N, and TP by over 90%. The platform’s multi-objective optimization framework highlights that coordinated, multi-scale interventions substantially outperform isolated strategies in both effectiveness and sustainability. These findings provide a replicable and data-driven paradigm for 3WRR implementation in complex river–lake systems. The platform’s application and promotion in other watersheds worldwide will serve to enable the low-cost and high-efficiency management of watershed water environments.