Guest edited by the directorate of the NERC Macronutrient Cycles Programme, Professor Paul Whitehead (Director) and Dr Jill Crossman (Assistant Director), this themed issue focuses upon the key macronutrient cycles linking nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon. Disturbance of the interactions, or cycles, of these macronutrients has had significant environmental and economic implications including soil nutrient enrichment, eutrophication of surface waters, reduced air quality, and loss of drinking water quality. These issues pose a threat not just to biodiversity, but also to public water supplies and public health.
Within this themed issue are four HOT research papers, which received particularly high scores during peer review – click on the links to download the articles:
1. Carly Stevens and colleagues describe a nitrogen footprint tool for the UK, demonstrating that the UK footprint is smaller than that found in the USA but higher than that for the Netherlands and Germany.
2. Researchers from Lancaster University investigate cattle in-stream activity in order to further our understanding of cattle contribution to sediment load.
3. Researchers from Norway and Canada model phosphorus loading and algal blooms in an agricultural catchment-lake system under changing land-use and climate.
4. Our fourth HOT article focuses on phosphorus transport and assessment using a semi-distributed catchment model.
Click here to view the full macronutrient cycles themed issue – we hope you enjoy the collection
