Managing Nitrogen Legacies to Accelerate Water Quality Improvement
Abstract
Water quality is under severe threat, from intensive agricultural practices and widespread over-application of commercial fertilizers, to climate change and wildfires threatening our drinking water supplies, to emerging contaminants from rapid urbanization and concentrated livestock operations. Multiple new policies have been developed to improve water quality in our lakes and streams; however, water quality remains a persistent problem. Such apparent failures can be attributed in part to legacy pollutants that has accumulated over decades of agricultural intensification and that can lead to time lags in water quality improvement. Here, we focus on nitrogen legacies. We identify the key knowledge gaps related to landscape nitrogen legacies and propose approaches to manage and improve water quality, given the presence of these legacies.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFM.H12G..06B