Salt marshes are highly productive coastal wetlands that provide important ecosystem services such as storm protection for coastal cities, nutrient removal and carbon sequestration. Despite protective measures, however, worldwide losses of these ecosystems have accelerated in recent decades. Here we present data from a nine-year whole-ecosystem nutrient-enrichment experiment. Our study demonstrates that nutrient enrichment, a global problem for coastal ecosystems, can be a driver of salt marsh loss.

Anthropogenic-induced changes in nutrient ratios have increased the susceptibility of large temperate lakes to several effects of rising air temperatures and the resulting heating of water bodies. First, warming leads to stronger thermal stratification, thus impeding natural complete water turnover (holomixis), which compensates for oxygen deficits in the deep zones. Second, increased water temperatures and nutrient concentrations can directly favour the growth of harmful algae. Thus, lake-restoration programmes have focused on reducing nutrients to limit toxic algal blooms.

Global warming and the alteration of the global nitrogen cycle are major anthropogenic threats to the environment. Denitrification, the biological conversion of nitrate to gaseous nitrogen, removes a substantial fraction of the nitrogen from aquatic ecosystems, and can therefore help to reduce eutrophication effects.

A hallmark of the latter half of the 20th century is the widespread, rapid intensification of a variety of anthropogenically-driven environmental changes

Water masses can become undersaturated with oxygen when natural processes alone or in combination with anthropogenic processes produce enough organic carbon that is aerobically decomposed faster than the rate of oxygen reaeration. The dominant natural processes usually involved are photosynthetic carbon production and microbial respiration. The re-supply rate is indirectly related to its isolation from the surface layer.

Nutrient over enrichment of freshwater and coastal ecosystems

Nutrient cycles link agricultural systems to their societies and surroundings; inputs of nitrogen and phosphorus in particular are essential for high crop yields, but downstream and downwind losses of these same nutrients diminish environmental quality and human well-being.

Human-induced eutrophication, or nutrient overenrichment, is a rapidly growing environmental crisis in freshwater and marine systems worldwide. Nutrients that cause eutrophication include nitrogen and phosphorus.

Human activities have increased the availability of nutrients in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. In grasslands, this eutrophication causes loss of plant species diversity, but the mechanism of this loss has been difficult to determine.

Improvements in the water quality of many freshwater and most coastal marine ecosystems requires reductions in both nitrogen and phosphorus inputs.

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