Coupled biogeochemical cycles in freshwaters: landscape, limnoscape, and legacies
Abstract: Understanding how various watershed features, be they natural or anthropogenically altered, influence riverine biogeochemistry and elemental stoichiometry is crucial to management and maintaining aquatic ecosystem health. Net anthropogenic nitrogen and phosphorus inputs (NANI/NAPI) is a relatively simple mass balance approach that allows for the identification of concentrated areas of nutrients in watersheds as a function of human activities that has been successfully linked to predicting loading into rivers. However, few attempts have been made to assess NANI/NAPI at scales relevant to management and quantify how changes over time have influenced the relative importance of elemental loading and ecosystem level stoichiometry. Here we present a few examples of the seasonal effects of loadings and applicability of NANI/NAPI as a relevant tool for watershed management at the municipal scale. Furthermore, we show how historical changes and human interventions in the landscape have altered riverine loads and stoichiometries in differential ways as a function of dominant entrance pathways to provide solutions for mitigation.
About the speaker: Roxane Maranger is a Full Professor in the Département des sciences biologiques at Université de Montréal and a Canada Research Chair, Tier 1 in Aquatic Ecosystem Science and Sustainability. She was the President of the Association of the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO, from 2020-2022), an international scientific society with over 3500 members from over 65 different countries and has held many other leadership positions in science. Her research is broadly related to how anthropogenic activities on the landscape and climate change influence water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and major biogeochemical cycles in both freshwater and marine ecosystems.
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