Diel turbidity cycles in a headwater stream: evidence of nocturnal bioturbation?

Purpose: A small number of recent studies have linked daily cycles in stream turbidity to nocturnal bioturbation by aquatic fauna, principally crayfish, and demonstrated this process can significantly impact upon water quality under baseflow conditions. Adding to this limited body of research, we use high-resolution water quality monitoring data to investigate evidence of diel turbidity cycles in a lowland, headwater stream with a known signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) population and explore a range of potential causal mechanisms. Materials and methods: Automatic bankside monitoring stations measured turbidity and other water quality parameters at 30-min resolution at three locations on the River Blackwater, Norfolk, UK during 2013. Specifically, we focused on two 20-day periods of baseflow conditions during January and April 2013 which displayed turbidity trends typical of winter and spring seasons, respectively. The turbidity time-series, which were smoothed with 6.5 hour Savitzky-Golay filters to highlight diel trends, were correlated against temperature, stage, dissolved oxygen and pH to assess the importance of abiotic influences on turbidity. Turbidity was also calibrated against suspended particulate matter (SPM) over a wide range of values via linear regression. Results and discussion: Pronounced diel turbidity cycles were found at two of the three sites under baseflow conditions during April. Spring night-time turbidity values consistently peaked between 21:00 and 04:00 with values increasing by ~10 nephelometric turbidity units (NTU) compared with the lowest recorded daytime values which occurred between 10:00 and 14:00. This translated into statistically significant increases in median midnight SPM concentration of up to 76% compared with midday, with night-time (18:00 – 05:30) SPM loads also up to 30% higher than that recorded during the daytime (06:00 – 17:30). Relating turbidity to other water quality parameters exhibiting diel cycles revealed there to be neither any correlation that might indicate a causal link, nor any obvious mechanistic connections to explain the temporal turbidity trends. Diel turbidity cycles were less prominent at all sites during the winter. Conclusions: Considering the seasonality and timing of elevated turbidity, visual observations of crayfish activity, and an absence of mechanistic connections with other water quality parameters, the results presented here are consistent with the hypothesis that nocturnal bioturbation is responsible for generating diel turbidity cycles under baseflow conditions in headwater streams. However, further research in a variety of fluvial environments is required to better assess the spatial extent, importance and causal mechanisms of this phenomenon

Application of high-resolution telemetered sensor technology to develop conceptual models of catchment hydrogeological processes

Mitigating agricultural water pollution requires changes in land management practices and the implementation of on-farm measures to tackle the principal reasons for water quality failure. However, a paucity of robust empirical evidence on the hydrological functioning of river catchments can be a major constraint on the design of effective pollution mitigation strategies at the catchment-scale. In this regard, in 2010 the UK government established the Demonstration Test Catchment (DTC) initiative to evaluate the extent to which on-farm mitigation measures can cost-effectively reduce the impacts of agricultural water pollution on river ecology while maintaining food production capacity. A central component of the DTC platform has been the establishment of a comprehensive network of automated, web-based sensor technologies to generate high-temporal resolution empirical datasets of surface water, soil water, groundwater and meteorological parameters. In this paper, we demonstrate how this high-resolution telemetry can be used to improve our understanding of hydrological functioning and the dynamics of pollutant mobilisation and transport under a range of hydrometerological and hydrogeological conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these data can be used to develop conceptual models of catchment hydrogeological processes and consider the implications of variable hydrological functioning on the performance of land management changes aimed at reducing agricultural water pollution

High-resolution monitoring of catchment nutrient response to the end of the 2011-2012 drought in England, captured by the demonstration test catchments.

The Demonstration Test Catchments (DTC) project is a UK Government funded initiative to test the effectiveness of on-farm mitigation measures designed to reduce agricultural pollution without compromising farm productivity. Three distinct catchments in England have been chosen to test the efficacy of mitigation measures on working farms in small tributary sub-catchments equipped with continuous water quality monitoring stations. The Hampshire Avon in the south is a mixed livestock and arable farming catchment, the River Wensum in the east is a lowland catchment with predominantly arable farming and land use in the River Eden catchment in the north-west is predominantly livestock farming. One of the many strengths of the DTC as a national research platform is that it provides the ability to investigate catchment hydrology and biogeochemical response across different landscapes and geoclimatic characteristics, with a range of differing flow behaviours, geochemistries and nutrient chemistries. Although numerous authors present studies of individual catchment responses to storms, no studies exist of multiple catchment responses to the same rainfall event captured with in situ high-resolution nutrient monitoring at a national scale. This paper brings together findings from all three DTC research groups to compare the response of the catchments to a major storm event in April 2012. This was one of the first weather fronts to track across the country following a prolonged drought period affecting much of the UK through 2011–2012, marking an unusual meteorological transition when a rapid shift from drought to flood risk occurred. The effects of the weather front on discharge and water chemistry parameters, including nitrogen species (NO3-N and NH4-N) and phosphorus fractions (total P (TP) and total reactive P (TRP)), measured at a half-hourly time step are examined. When considered in the context of one hydrological year, flow and concentration duration curves reveal that the weather fronts resulted in extreme flow, nitrate and TP concentrations in all three catchments but with distinct differences in both hydrographs and chemographs. Hysteresis loops constructed from high resolution data are used to highlight an array of potential pollutant sources and delivery pathways. In the Hampshire Avon DTC, transport was dominated by sub-surface processes, where phosphorus, largely in the soluble form, was found to be transport-limited. In the Wensum DTC, transport was largely dominated by rapid sub-surface movement due to the presence of under-drainage, which mobilised large quantities of nitrate during the storm. In the Eden DTC, transport was found to be initially dominated by surface runoff, which switched to subsurface delivery on the falling limb of the hydrograph, with the surface delivery transporting large amounts of particulate phosphorus to the river, with a transport-limited response. The lack of exhaustion of nutrient delivery in response to such extreme flow generation indicates the size of the nutrient pools stored in these catchments, and highlights the scale of the challenges faced by environmental managers when designing mitigation measures to reduce the flux of nutrients to UK river systems from diffuse agricultural sources

Indirect Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Surface Water Bodies in a Lowland Arable Catchment: A Significant Contribution to Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Budgets?

In the UK agriculture is by far the largest source of nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions. Direct N₂O emissions as a result of nitrogen (N) application to soils have been well documented in the UK, whereas indirect emissions produced in surface waters and groundwaters from leached N are much less understood with limited data to support IPCC emission factors. Indirect emissions were studied in surface waters in the Upper Thurne, a lowland drained arable catchment in eastern England. All surface waters were found to have dissolved N₂O concentrations above that expected if in equilibrium with ambient concentrations, demonstrating all surface waters were acting as a source of N₂O. The drainage channels represented 86% of the total indirect N₂O flux, followed by wetland areas, 11%, and the river, 3%. The dense drainage network was found to have the highest dissolved N₂O concentrations of all the water bodies studied with a combined N₂O flux of 16 kg N₂O–N per day in March 2007. Such indirect fluxes are comparable to direct fluxes per hectare and represent a significant proportion of the total N₂O flux for this catchment. Separate emission factors were established for the three different surface water types within the same catchment, suggesting that the one emission factor used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methodology for predicting all indirect N₂O emissions is inappropriate

Antecedent conditions, hydrological connectivity and anthropogenic inputs:Factors affecting nitrate and phosphorus transfers to agricultural headwater streams

This paper examines relationships between rainfall–runoff, catchment connectivity, antecedentmoisture conditions and fertiliser application with nitrate-N and total phosphorus (TP) fluxes in an arable headwater catchment over three hydrological years (2012–2014). Annual precipitation totals did not vary substantially between years, yet the timing of rainfall strongly influenced runoff generation and subsequent nitrate-N and TP fluxes. The greatest nitrate-N (N250 kgNday−1) andTP(N10 kg TP day−1) fluxes only occurred when shallow groundwater was within 0.6 m of the ground surface and runoff coefficients were greater than 0.1. These thresholds were reached less frequently in 2012 due to drought recovery resulting in lower annual nitrate-N (7.4 kg N ha−1) and TP (0.12 kg P ha−1) fluxes in comparison with 2013 (15.1 kg N ha−1; 0.21 kg P ha−1). The wet winter of 2013 with elevated shallow groundwater levels led to more frequent activation of sub-surface pathways and tile drain flow. Throughout the period, dry antecedent conditions had a temporary effect in elevating TP loads. Evidence of TP source exhaustion after consecutive storm events can be attributed to the repeated depletion of temporarily connected critical source areas to the river network via impermeable road surfaces. Fertiliser application varied considerably across three years due to differences in crop rotation between farms,with annual N and P fertiliser inputs varying by up to 21% and 41%, respectively. Proportional reductions in annual riverine nitrate-N and TP loadings were not observed at the sub-catchment outlet as loadings were largely influenced by annual runoff. Nitrate loadingswere slightly higher during fertiliser application, but there was little relationship between P fertiliser application and riverine TP load. These data indicate that this intensive arable catchment may be in a state of biogeochemical stationarity, whereby legacy stores of nutrients buffer against changes in contemporary nutrient inputs