Title: Nutrient Export from Urban and Rural Watersheds to Large Lakes: Addressing the Diversity of Nutrient Sources, Speciation and Transport Pathways, and Their In-Lake Biogeochemical Impacts

Large lakes and their watersheds experience multiple and evolving stressors such as climate change, urbanization, deforestation, agricultural intensification, river damming, and shoreline development. The impacts resulting from these stressors are highly dynamic in nature creating complexities and uncertainties in characterizing the associated nutrient fluxes. For instance, estimating urban nutrient export loads and chemical speciation remain uncertain. Urban landscapes contribute to both point and non-point nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and other nutrients inputs to lakes, often with distinct characteristics in loads, bioavailability, and ratios compared to agricultural and industrial landscapes.This session focuses on enhancing our understanding of quantitative and qualitative characterization of the coupled biogeochemical cycling of nutrients (N, P, Si) in lakes and their watersheds employing various approaches, ranging from mechanistic to statistical and observational modeling, field and experimental studies, and machine learning. We invite contributions addressing the uncertainties of nutrient loads from agricultural and urban landscapes, relationships between nutrient speciation and loads and lake concentrations, upstream-downstream nutrient transport and within-lake inter-basin exchanges, nutrient cycling within lakes, particularly in nearshore zones, including exchanges between nearshore and offshore areas in the context of climate change.

Chaired by:
Serghei A Bocaniov, University of Waterloo
Zahra Akbarzadeh, University of Waterloo
Philippe Van Cappellen, University of Waterloo, Water Institute Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Department of Biology