Recent Advances in Modeling Phosphorus and Nitrogen Delivery to the Gulf of Mexico and Implications for Managing Nutrients n the Mississippi River Basin

Although the increased availability of reactive nutrients in past decades has benefited society via food and energy production, the corresponding rise in nutrient loadings to aquatic ecosystems is of particular concern, especially in many estuaries globally where increased nutrient loads have contributed to eutrophic conditions. In the United States, elevated riverine nutrients have contributed to stressed trophic conditions in a majority of estuaries, including the shallow coastal waters of the Louisiana shelf in the northern Gulf of Mexico, where both nitrogen and phosphorus loadings are recognized as contributing to seasonal hypoxic conditions. Advances in geospatial modeling of nitrogen and phosphorus sources and transport in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River Basins (MARB), as reported in a recent U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study, provide important information to support improved assessments and management of nutrient loadings to the northern Gulf of Mexico. We summarize the findings of this study and discuss the implications for managing nutrient sources in the MARB. The study reveals important differences in the sources and aquatic transport of nitrogen and phosphorus that affect delivery to the Gulf. Although agricultural sources contribute a majority of the delivered nutrients to the Gulf, corn and soybean cultivation is the largest contributor of nitrogen whereas phosphorus originates primarily from animal manure on pasture and rangelands. Atmospheric deposition is the second leading source of nitrogen, with urban sources contributing relatively small quantities of both nutrients. Furthermore, we find that both nitrogen and phosphorus delivery to the Gulf is controlled by hydrological and biogeochemical processes (e.g., water travel time, denitrification, storage) that scale with stream size, although phosphorus also displays large local- and regional-scale differences in delivery caused by reservoir trapping. The importance of these processes underscores the need to account for the nonlinear interactions of aquatic transport processes with watershed nutrient sources in developing efficient nutrient reduction strategies for the MARB. Such strategies will need to consider a diversity of nutrient sources, including the different effects of agricultural production systems on nitrogen and phosphorus runoff to streams, the contributions of atmospheric nitrogen, and improved management of phosphorus sources downstream from reservoirs.