The Artificial wetlands biome includes built structures that hold or transfer water for human use, treatment, or disposal, including large storage reservoirs, farm dams or ponds, recreational and ornamental wetlands, rice paddies, freshwater aquafarms, wastewater storages and treatment ponds, and canals, ditches and drains. These are globally distributed but are most often found in humid and subhumid tropical and temperate environments where rural and urban developments are predominant.

Most of these ecosystems contain standing water with the exception of canals and drains. For most of these ecosystems, energy, water, and nutrients come primarily from allochthonous sources, either incidentally from run-off (e.g. farm dams, ditches and storm water canals) or groundwater, or deterministically by management (e.g. rice paddies, aquafarms, and wastewater ponds), but autochthonous energy sources (in situ algae and macrophytes) can be important in some artificial waterbodies. Water chemistry varies with human use, with some wastewater ponds accumulating toxins or eutrophic levels of nutrients, while large reservoirs with undisturbed catchments may be oligotrophic.

Artificial wetlands are generally less temporally variable, more spatially homogeneous, and often support less biological diversity and trophic complexity of their natural analogues. Nonetheless, in some highly transformed landscapes, they may provide anthropogenic refuges and critical habitat for complementary suites of native biota to that remaining in depleted wetlands, including some biota that no longer occur in natural or semi-natural ecosystems, as well as a range of opportunistic colonists.

Trophic webs vary with the connectivity and depth of the water body, temperature, and substrate. The simplest artificial wetlands support only microbial biota, while the most diverse can include submerged or emergent plant communities, which promote complex habitats for invertebrates, fish, waterbirds, amphibians, reptiles, and, sometimes, amphibious mammals.