Dissecting the ecosystem service of large-scale pollutant retention: The role of wetlands and other landscape features

Abstract

Various features of a landscape contribute to the regulating ecosystem service of reducing waterborne pollutant loading to downstream environments. At local scales, wetlands have been shown to be effective in retaining pollutants. Here, we investigate the landscape-scale contribution to pollutant retention provided by multiple wetlands. We develop a general analytical model which shows that the retention contribution of wetlands and other landscape features is only significant if a large fraction of the total waterborne pollutant transport passes through them. Next, by means of a statistical analysis of official data, we quantify the nutrient retention contribution of wetlands for multiple sub-catchments in two Swedish Water Management Districts. We compare this with the retention contribution of two other landscape features: the waterborne transport distance and major lakes. The landscape-scale retention contribution of wetlands is undetectable; rather, the other two landscape features account for much of the total nutrient retention.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-014-0594-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Assessment of hydrologic connectivity in an ungauged wetland with InSAR observations

“…impact, restoration and conservation (Freeman et al 2007, Quin et al 2015, Van Meter and Basu 2015, Thorslund et al 2017. Alteration in wetland connectivity is one of the major causes of wetland degradation globally (Jimenez et al 1985) and combined with macroclimatic changes, it can pose a highly detrimental threat to these ecosystems (Blanco et al 2006, Osland et al 2016.…”

Data‐driven Nutrient‐landscape Relationships across Regions and Scales

“…A low transmission rate of terrestrial nitrogen inputs to riverine export in these regions is well known (e.g., Howarth et al, 1996;Destouni et al, 2006) and generally attributed to denitrification and soil retention processes. The relative balance of these processes is still poorly understood , however recent results have related relative attenuation of both nitrogen and phosphorus on catchment-scales to various landscape features and aspects, such as lakes and wetlands and transport distance to the load recipient (Quin et al, 2015). Fertilization accounts for over 95% of the human phosphorus inputs across MRB and BSDB (Figure 1b).…”

“…The importance of these coastal-marine areas and ecosystems has brought about long-term monitoring that can be leveraged through data-driven (empirical) approaches (e.g., Destouni et al, 2008;van der Velde et al, 2013). Much work has proposed approaches to connect monitoring data, for example, average annual nutrient export loads or yields, with nutrient inputs (Howarth, 1998;Quin et al, 2015), land cover fractions (Beaulac and Reckhow, 1982;Alexander et al, 2004) and population densities (Peierls et al, 1991;Destouni et al, 2008). These approaches can sometimes be attractive over more physics-based approaches due to their simplicity.…”

HGM: a call for model validation

“…We now are fully aware that wetlands provide such essential ecosystem services such as pollution abatement (Quin et al 2015) or hunting, fishing and ecotourism (Ricaurte et al 2014). It is obvious that the ecosystem services provided by wetlands that have been lost are long gone.…”