Nitrogen Fluxes and Retention in Urban Watershed Ecosystems |
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Authors: | Peter M.?Groffman author-information" > author-information__contact u-icon-before" > mailto:groffmanp@ecostudies.org" title=" groffmanp@ecostudies.org" itemprop=" email" data-track=" click" data-track-action=" Email author" data-track-label=" " >Email author,Neely L.?Law,Kenneth T.?Belt,Lawrence E.?Band,Gary T.?Fisher |
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Affiliation: | (1) Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, New York 12545, USA;(2) Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA;(3) Urban Forestry Ecological Research Unit, NE/USDA Forest Service, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland 21227, USA;(4) US Geological Survey, Baltimore, Maryland 21237, USA |
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Abstract: | Although the watershed approach has long been used to study whole-ecosystem function, it has seldom been applied to study human-dominated systems, especially those dominated by urban and suburban land uses. Here we present 3 years of data on nitrogen (N) losses from one completely forested, one agricultural, and six urban/suburban watersheds, and input–output N budgets for suburban, forested, and agricultural watersheds. The work is a product of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, a long-term study of urban and suburban ecosystems, and a component of the US National Science Foundation s long-term ecological research (LTER) network. As expected, urban and suburban watersheds had much higher N losses than did the completely forested watershed, with N yields ranging from 2.9 to 7.9 kg N ha–1 y–1 in the urban and suburban watersheds compared with less than 1 kg N ha–1 y–1 in the completely forested watershed. Yields from urban and suburban watersheds were lower than those from an agricultural watershed (13–19.8 kg N ha–1 y–1). Retention of N in the suburban watershed was surprisingly high, 75% of inputs, which were dominated by home lawn fertilizer (14.4 kg N ha–1 y–1) and atmospheric deposition (11.2 kg N ha–1 y–1). Detailed analysis of mechanisms of N retention, which must occur in the significant amounts of pervious surface present in urban and suburban watersheds, and which include storage in soils and vegetation and gaseous loss, is clearly warranted. |
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Keywords: | nitrogen nitrate watershed urban mass balance long-term ecological research |
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