You are here:
N-Sink, a Web Tool to Support Community Nitrogen and Land Use Decisions in Watersheds
Citation:
Lei-Parent, Q., C. Arnold, C. Chadwick, E. Wilson, D. Dickson, D. Kellogg, Jeff Hollister, AND A. Gold. N-Sink, a Web Tool to Support Community Nitrogen and Land Use Decisions in Watersheds. Coastal GeoTools, Virtual, February 08 - 11, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
Excess nitrogen can result in degraded coastal water quality, thus managing and reducing nitrogen delivery to coastal waters is important. In this presentation, we discuss tools and a method, NSink, that provides detailed spatial information the areas inside a watershed that have high potential to remove nitrogen. This type of information is need as it allows managers and planners to make decisions that are going to better protect coastal water quality from the impacts of excess nitrogen. Additionally, the multiple NSink tools are in development that provide open source solutions as well as tools for a variety of stakeholders including the general public, managers, and scientists.
Description:
Nitrogen(N) pollution is a major threat to coastal watersheds, estuaries and embayments, and the communities within their watersheds. As a result, federal water quality programs have mandated that decision makers address N pollution in land use policies and decisions. N-Sink, a tool that uses geospatial analysis to map N sources and sinks, can help land use managers to better understand the relationships between land use and N pollution in watersheds. N-Sink is a geospatial visualization tool that assists in identifying the areas in watersheds that are important to N pollution management. N-Sink uses the best available science on land use/nitrogen interactions, plus widely available data on hydrography, soils and land use, to highlight major sources and sinks of N in a watershed. N-Sink is a partnership between the University of Rhode Island and the University of Connecticut and has been supported for the past several years by EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD). UConn Center of Land Education and Research (CLEAR) is currently transforming N-Sink to a web-based interactive mapping tool, built using R and the ArcGIS platform, that can be accessed by stakeholders through a web browser. In addition, the tool will allow users to specify a source location and generate a flow path of N to a watershed’s outlet and estimate N reduction along the flow path.
