Urban Stream Burial Increases Watershed-Scale Nitrate Export

Jake J Beaulieu, Heather E Golden, Christopher D Knightes, Paul M Mayer, Sujay S Kaushal, Michael J Pennino, Clay P Arango, David A Balz, Colleen M Elonen, Ken M Fritz and Brian H Hill

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-14

Abstract: Nitrogen (N) uptake in streams is an important ecosystem service that reduces nutrient loading to downstream ecosystems. Here we synthesize studies that investigated the effects of urban stream burial on N-uptake in two metropolitan areas and use simulation modeling to scale our measurements to the broader watershed scale. We report that nitrate travels on average 18 times farther downstream in buried than in open streams before being removed from the water column, indicating that burial substantially reduces N uptake in streams. Simulation modeling suggests that as burial expands throughout a river network, N uptake rates increase in the remaining open reaches which somewhat offsets reduced N uptake in buried reaches. This is particularly true at low levels of stream burial. At higher levels of stream burial, however, open reaches become rare and cumulative N uptake across all open reaches in the watershed rapidly declines. As a result, watershed-scale N export increases slowly at low levels of stream burial, after which increases in export become more pronounced. Stream burial in the lower, more urbanized portions of the watershed had a greater effect on N export than an equivalent amount of stream burial in the upper watershed. We suggest that stream daylighting (i.e., uncovering buried streams) can increase watershed-scale N retention.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132256 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 32256&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0132256

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0132256

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().