Wednesday, All Day in Poster Hall
, Thursday, All Day in Poster Hall
(subject to change)
A shallow estuary on Buzzards Bay, MA (West Falmouth Harbor) has recently begun receiving increased nitrogen loading via groundwater from an aquifer contaminated with effluent from a waste water treatment facility. In shallow estuaries, a combination of hydrologic and biogeochemical processes affect the fate of nitrogen and the system’s ability to act as a nitrogen sink. Changes in the rates of biogeochemical processes as a result of excess nitrogen will determine the ability of the ecosystem to mediate the affects of anthropogenic nitrogen additions, including changes in biotic uptake, mineralization, denitrification, and nitrogen fixation. To examine the balance of these processes on an ecosystem scale, we are measuring the nitrogen exchange between the estuary and adjacent oceanic waters across multiple time scales (annually and seasonally). Detailed tidal and bathymetric data are combined with frequent measures of total nitrogen at the estuary/bay interface to identify the net transport of nitrogen across this boundary. Combined with other concurrent research on the inputs of nitrogen to the estuary, this will allow us to calculate the fraction of nitrogen exported from the system, and the amount removed as the balance of internal nitrogen removal and transformation processes.
