“Environmental science: Nutrients in synergy” by Eric A. Davidson and Robert W. Howarth (Nature 449, 1000–1001; 2007).

This News & Views article discussed a paper in Ecology Letters (doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2007.01113.x; 2007), and included the comment that the results in the paper support the rule-of-thumb that the biological response to phosphorus addition is greater than that to nitrogen addition in freshwater ecosystems. That is true for lake benthos, but not for lake ecosystems as a whole, where the responses to nitrogen and phosphorus are similar.