Abstract
Human activity has dramatically altered global nitrogen fluxes, nearly doubling the nitrogen export from land to coast1. Fertilizer run-off accounts for much of this increase2,3. The role of commercial fisheries in altering fish stocks has been explored4,5,6, but their effect on the return of nitrogen from coastal oceans to land is less well known. Here we quantify the nitrogen return to land via fisheries and compare it with nitrogen fertilizer inputs into the coastal ocean regionally and over time. We find that both fertilizer run-off into the ocean and fishery removal of nitrogen have increased over the past four decades, but the increase in nitrogen input has been faster. Although our estimate for the ratio of nitrogen return to nitrogen input has therefore decreased over time from about 60% in 1960 to about 20% in 2000, we conclude that fishery harvest is a significant, and currently underappreciated, aspect of anthropogenic nitrogen flux in many coastal regions.
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Acknowledgements
We thank E. Dumont, who provided global GIS referred data layers for fertilizer application, K. Goodwin for GIS technical assistance, J. Cole and D. Pauly for comments and discussion. This research was supported by an NSERC discovery grant and an FQRNT strategic professor grant to R.M. and a National Science Foundation grant to N.C. This manuscript is dedicated to the memory of Ransom Myers (1952–2007).
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R.M. conceptualized the main idea, collected and analysed the fish and fertilizer data and wrote the manuscript. N.C. integrated into the GIS and modelled the fertilizer loading into the LMEs and made important contributions to the concept and the writing process. J.D. contributed to the interpretation and collection of data as an undergraduate thesis. M.A. contributed to the concept and the writing process.
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Supplementary table S1 and figure S1 (PDF 688 kb)
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Maranger, R., Caraco, N., Duhamel, J. et al. Nitrogen transfer from sea to land via commercial fisheries. Nature Geosci 1, 111–112 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo108
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo108
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