Abstract
The north-western Black Sea, a shallow semi-enclosed area, is highly sensitive to eutrophication receiving the discharge from the Danube, Dniestr and Dniepr rivers. Since the 1960’s, riverine nitrogen and phosphorus loads dramatically increased respectively by a factor 3 and 10, as a consequence of urban and industrial development and intensive use of fertilisers in agriculture. Over the same period, silicon carried out by rivers significantly decreased as a result of hydraulic management programmes. Changes that occurred in the nutrient environment of the north-western Black Sea have had as consequences dramatic modifications in the structure and functioning of the coastal ecosystem. We present here an explanatory model describing the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and silicon circulation through the coastal ecosystem over seasons and years, in response to physical and nutrient forcing. The performance of the model, in particular its ability to reproduce the ecological events which took place since 1960, is assessed by exploring the response of the model to scenarios of nutrient concentrations reproducing different conditions that were encountered since 1960.
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Van Eeckhout, D., Lancelot, C. (1997). Modelling the Functioning of the North-Western Black Sea Ecosystem from 1960 to Present. In: Özsoy, E., Mikaelyan, A. (eds) Sensitivity to Change: Black Sea, Baltic Sea and North Sea. NATO ASI Series, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5758-2_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5758-2_34
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-6429-3
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