Collaborative Research: Understanding the Scaling of N Cycle Controls Throughout a River Network

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Collaborative Research: Understanding the Scaling of N Cycle Controls Throughout a River Network Principal Investigator: Charles Vorosmarty (University of New Hampshire, Durham NH)Co-Investigators: Wil Wollheim (University of New Hampshire, Durham NH) Bruce Peterson (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole MA) Charles Hopkinson (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole MA) Michael Gooseff (Colorado School of Mines, Golden CO)In suburbanizing regions of the country, humans are rapidly changing the character of upland surface and ground waters. In countless watersheds, development has greatly increased riverborne pollution that ultimately passes to the coastal zone with negative impacts such as low oxygen dead zones and harmful algal blooms. The nature of these changes is poorly understood. The goal of the study is to better understand the sources and fates of one important nutrient, nitrogen. The effort is planned around field process studies and computer modeling in the Ipswich River, north of Boston. Because the proposed work focuses on deciphering the fundamental processes that govern sources and fates of nutrients in coastal watersheds, results will help to understand the vulnerability of river systems in other parts of the Northeastern U.S.A. The project will help address questions about how the location and types of land use change affect pollutant transport into sensitive coastal ecosystems and will thus help to improve existing environmental management strategies. The project also includes an undergraduate and graduate educational component to train the next generation of scientists and practitioners. An outreach program is designed to better inform citizens about the changes unfolding across their local watersheds.