Assessing Evidence of Phosphorus Concentration Trends in North American Fresh Waters.

ABSTRACT: The U.S. EPA's National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS) documented evidence of widespread, unexplained total phosphorus (TP) concentration increases in lakes and streams across the United States during the 2000 - 2012 time period. To examine the robustness of evidence for this trend, we used additional monitoring datasets to calculate rates of TP change in thousands of individual waterbodies across the U.S. during the same time frame, and compared them against TP change rates calculated in the same manner for waterbodies that were resurveyed under NARS in different years. For the additional datasets, median rates of TP change were substantially lower than median rates calculated using NARS data. To further examine differences between NARS and non-NARS results in specific waterbodies, we as

SUBMITTER: Carleton JN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10031499 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature