Potential modification of the fluxes of nitrogen from the Humber Estuary catchment (U.K.) to the North Sea in response to changing agricultural inputs and climate patterns

Abstract

The catchment of the Humber Estuary drains approximately 20% of the land area of England via two main rivers, the Trent and the Ouse, and a number of tributaries. The catchment is home to major metropolitan and industrial centres, as well as to extensive areas of agricultural land; for this reason, the river and estuarine systems have been subject to considerable anthropogenic inputs. The Humber Estuary is one of the largest U.K. estuaries and the major U.K. freshwater input to the North Sea. The U.K. Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Land Ocean Interaction Study (LOIS), which combined extensive physical and biogeochemical measurements with an integrated modelling programme, was established to examine the transport and fate of nutrients and other constituents through the land-sea boundary. In this paper, a model of nitrogen (nitrate, nitrite, ammonium, particulate nitrogen) transport and cycling in the Humber Estuary, calibrated on the basis of measured constituent concentrations at its riverine and marine boundaries, is linked off-line to a Humber catchment and rivers model of nitrogen transport, which furnished simulated constituent values at the tidal limits, and the resulting estuarine nitrogen profiles compared to those of the standalone estuarine model. The estuarine model is then re-run using simulated concentration values at the tidal limits from catchment-river model simulations incorporating realistic changes in agricultural fertiliser inputs and climate forcing functions. The standalone estuarine model simulation estimated nitrate+nitrite (~total nitrogen) export to the North Sea to be ca. 53 000 t in 1994 and 44 000 t in 1995. Following linkage of the estuarine and catchment-river models, the estimated fluxes for these years increased by 20–30%, relative to the standalone simulation. Higher winter riverine flows largely accounted for this difference. The altered flows also markedly changed the simulated concentrations and distributions of suspended particulate matter (SPM) within the estuary, indicating strongly that the transport and fluxes of particle-reactive and particle-associated constituents would show measurable differences. Scatter in the measured SPM data precluded identification of the more precise simulation run, however. Subsequent simulations using the linked models estimated that a 50% reduction in artificial fertiliser applications within the catchment gave a 10–15% decrease in nitrogen loads to the North Sea, relative to the 1994–95 input, whilst forcing the catchment model with a climate perhaps appropriate for the mid-21st century yielded nitrogen fluxes that were similar to those of the mid-1990s.