Citation:

Hollister, Jeff, D. Kellogg, Q. Lei-Parent, E. Wilson, C. Chadwick, D. Dickson, A. Gold, AND C. Arnold. nsink: An R package for flow path nitrogen removal estimation. Journal of Open Source Software. Journal of Open Source Software, 7(71):4039, (2022). https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04039

Impact/Purpose:

There are areas on a landscape, like lakes and wetlands, that do a good job of removing nitrogen from water before it can cause issues such as harmful algal blooms.  Past work has built on this idea and developed an approach, N-Sink, that quantifies how much nitrogen can be removed as water moves across the landscape.  Several iterations of the approach proved its worth, but required manual data collection and manipulation.  This paper describes an R package that automates the N-Sink analysis, outputs maps of nitrogen removal potential, and is applicable to any area in the United States.  This allows for broader application of the N-Sink approach.

Description:

The `nsink` package estimates cumulative nitrogen (N) removal along a specified flow path and is based on methodologies outlined in prior research. For a user-specified watershed, `nsink` downloads all required datasets from public datasets in the United States, prepares data for use, summarizes N removal along a flow path and creates several static watershed maps.  The results of an `nsink` analysis may be exported to standard geospatial files for use in other applications.

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