Land Cover Effects on Selected Nutrient Compounds in Small Lowland Agricultural Catchments

Abstract

The influence of landscape on nutrient dynamics in rivers constitutes an important research issue because of its significance with regard to water and land management. In the current study spatial and temporal variability of N-NO3 and P-PO4 concentrations and their landscape dependence was documented in the Świder River catchment in central Poland. From April 2019 to March 2020, water samples were collected from fourteen streams in the monthly timescale and the concentrations of N-NO3 and P-PO4 were correlated with land cover metrics based on the Corine Land Cover 2018 and Sentinel 2 Global Land Cover datasets. It was documented that agricultural lands and forests have a clear seasonal impact on N-NO3 concentrations, whereas the effect of meadows was weak and its direction was dependent on the dataset. The application of buffer zones metrics increased the correlation performance, whereas Euclidean distance scaling improved correlation mainly for forest datasets. The concentration of P-PO4 was not significantly related with land cover metrics, as their dynamics were driven mainly by hydrological conditions. The obtained results provided a new insight into landscape–water quality relationships in lowland agricultural landscape, with a special focus on evaluating the predictive performance of different land cover metrics and datasets.

Spatial and Seasonal Dynamics of Inorganic Nitrogen and Phosphorous Compounds in an Orchard-Dominated Catchment with Anthropogenic Impacts

“…A clear seasonal pattern of NO 3 − concentration was observed in the horticultural Mogielanka River catchment, which was generally consistent with the reported dynamics for typical arable lands, as the lowest concentrations occurred in the summer months while the highest in the winter [12,14,30,67]. However, an increase in NO 3 − concentration was documented in July, which can be related to the mobilization of such ions due to rainfall events.…”

“…On the other hand, livestock farming areas were documented to increase the concentration of free ammonia in the air [9,10], which may further affect NH 4 + levels in rainwater [11]. Nutrient enrichment is also accelerated by municipal activity, as septic tanks, in turn, are responsible for phosphorus, organic nitrogen, and ammonium releases to the aquatic environment [12][13][14]. Finally, another source of biogenic pollutants in water is outflows from landfills [15,16].…”

“…In most cases, clear relationships between the dominant type of catchment land use and nitrate concentration were documented, which were generally positive in the case of agricultural areas [35][36][37][38]. The opposite effect was broadly observed in the case of forested buffer zones, as their presence limited nitrate concentration [14,39], although such influence was seasonally differentiated [14]. Another common research issue was the prediction of nutrient concentration as an effect of non-point pollution with the use of the hydrological models, such as the SWAT model, or even with the use of an artificial neural network [40][41][42].…”

The Impact of Various Types of Cultivation on Stream Water Quality in Central Poland

“…However, the most broad applications of remote-sensing techniques can be found in terms of land cover classifications, which are used for simple comparison of water quality within the catchment's land use area [32], calculation of land use type contributions in buffer zones [33], and landscape metric computing [34,35]. These investigations have used datasets from authorial classifications of land cover [36], as well as broadly available and free datasets, such as CORINE Land Cover and Sentinel-2 Global Land Cover [37]. Such studies have focused mainly on comparing catchments with different land use types, e.g., forested, agricultural, and urbanized [38][39][40].…”

Land Use and Land Cover Shape River Water Quality at a Continental Caribbean Land-Ocean Interface

“…River water quality is related to the catchment land use and land cover (LULC) (Ngoye and Machiwa, 2004;Slaughter and Mantel, 2013;Kebede et al, 2014;Gallo et al, 2015;de Oliveira et al, 2016;Dumago et al, 2018;Łaszewski et al, 2021). The impacts of LULC change on river water quality are enhanced in the tropics due to biotic factors, such as higher biomass, and more productive tropical forests (Saatchi et al, 2011;Malhi, 2012); a abiotic factors, such as higher precipitation, intense and frequent flooding, and warmer temperatures (Stallard and Murphy, 2012); and anthropogenic factors such as rapidly expanding agricultural practices and population growth which can lead to different water quality responses in tropical rivers compared to temperate rivers (Laurance et al, 2014;Tanaka et al, 2021).…”