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Wetlands and nutrients at watershed scales: insights from big data and models
Citation:
Golden, H., Mohammad Adnan Rajib Bhuiyan, Samson Girma Mengistu, C. Lane, J. Christensen, AND Q. Wu. Wetlands and nutrients at watershed scales: insights from big data and models. Gordon Research Conference on Catchment Science, Andover, NH, June 23 - 28, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Presented at the Gordon Research Conference on Catchment Science
Description:
The extent to which wetlands mediate water quality, and specifically nutrient pollution, across large watersheds remains largely unexplored. Here we assess how wetlands attenuate nutrient concentrations and yields across the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB), an approximately 490,000 km2 system. To do this, we: (1) modify existing large-scale process-based models to integrate landscape wetlands and (2) apply statistical approaches on available spatial and “big” data to gain insights into how various landscape surface depressions, wetlands, and flowpaths interact with sources to influence total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) concentrations. The former approach affords hydrological improvements in large scale process-based modeling to support quantification of how nutrient dynamics in wetlands affect downstream water quality. The latter provides key insights on the degree to which landscape wetlands influence TN and TP within the UMRB. Our results suggest that wetlands have considerable potential to mediate watershed-scale nutrient yields across this large river basin. Based on our findings, we suggest that research scientists and managers should begin integrating wetland processes into watershed-scale modeling to improve nutrient export predictions under future climate and land cover conditions.
URLs/Downloads:
https://www.grc.org/catchment-science-interactions-of-hydrology-biology-and-geochemistry-conference/2019/