Understand the global nitrogen cycle and human impacts: Explain how human activities have doubled the total amount of nitrogen compared to natural sources and identify the specialized microbial processes, such as nitrification and denitrification, that transform nitrogen in the environment.
Recognize the consequences of excess nutrients: Describe how nutrient runoff causes eutrophication and creates low-oxygen, or hypoxic, "dead zones" that severely impact marine ecosystems, such as in the Gulf of Mexico.
Analyze climate change effects on water quality: Explain how future climate models predict more extreme precipitation events, which will increase the amount of sediment and particulate nutrients washing into water supplies.
Identify agricultural nutrient sources and management practices: Recognize that farms are a dominant source of nitrogen loading and identify voluntary farm management practices, such as rotational grazing and fencing cattle out of waterways, that reduce nutrient runoff.
Evaluate the role of wetlands versus agricultural drainage: Contrast how natural wetlands remove nitrogen from water through denitrification, while artificial tile drains used in agriculture bypass these natural services and deliver nitrate directly into streams.
Assess environmental justice in wastewater management: Understand how failing residential septic systems in disadvantaged communities pose environmental justice concerns and explore the implications of using public funds to support rural septic management.
Disease Ecology: Be able to describe links between nutrient pollution and disease.
Slides
Required Reading
See the NYCDEP Watershed Protection Program Summary and Assessment Report, submitted to the EPA in March 2021, Section 3.10 “Environmental Infrastructure Programs” (p.109-117). This provides an overview of the programs to limit sewage export to waterways.
Optional Reading