Considering the stochastic and complex pollutant emissions in the application of floating wetlands, we investigate the effects of release position on the solute transport in this work. On the basis of the analytical expressions derived from concentration moments, the temporal evolutions of dispersion intensity, the cloud distortion, and the displacement of the cloud centroid at the preasymptotic stage are all analyzed. Owing to the nonhomogeneous flow field, the location of the point source determines the strength of the initial advection, diffusion, and velocity shear acting on a solute cloud, which in turn affects the dispersion process. As a result, the waiting time before the dispersion enters the anomalous regime, the dispersion mechanism, the normality of mean concentration distribution, and the form of spatial concentration distribution are all influenced by the initial condition. The time at which the Taylor dispersion …