Goal of this paper is to suitably combine a model with an anisotropic mesh adaptation for the numerical simulation of nonlinear advection-diffusion-reaction systems and incompressible flows in ecological and environmental applications. Using the reduced-basis method terminology, the proposed approach leads to a noticeable computational saving of the online phase with respect to the resolution of the reference model on nonadapted grids. The search of a suitable adapted model/mesh pair is to be meant, instead, in an offline fashion.