Pairing Traditional Approaches with High-resolution In-situ Sensors to Advance the Science of Nutrient Fluxes from Agricultural Catchments

Agricultural catchments are hot spots of nutrient (nitrogen, phosphorus) fluxes to downstream watersheds. New tools are needed to disentangle flow pathways, hot spots, and the interplay of nutrient dynamics. Yet, the constraints (cost, labor) have limited our ability to use the new tools to understand nutrient dynamics from land to water. The traditional approaches of water quality monitoring (grab or composite samples collected with autosamplers) remain the gold standard for water quality monitoring, although they yield limited information on the mechanistic controls of nutrient losses. This presentation will discuss how pairing the traditional approaches (such as autosamplers) with in-situ nutrient sensors in agricultural catchments furthered our understanding of hot spots, pathways, and stoichiometric controls on nitrate and orthophosphate losses and advanced the science of water quality monitoring in agricultural catchments.