Nitrogen -- the silent species eliminator

Science Daily: Nitrogen pollution from agriculture and fossil fuels is known to be seriously damaging grasslands in the UK. A new European study is starting to show that the effect is Europe-wide, confirming that current policies to protect ecosystems may need a re-think.

When Carly Stevens finished her PhD in 2004, her findings were published in Science. Stevens had found the first evidence that nitrogen deposition from the atmosphere was depleting numbers of plant species in British grasslands.…

…The approach to protecting wildlife from nitrogen pollution is to calculate critical load values for different ecosystems – how much nitrogen a system can accumulate every year before damage occurs. Infertile habitats, like heathlands and bogs, are the most vulnerable. But Stevens’ research showed that species are being lost even where deposition is ‘beneath’ the critical load for grasslands.

“The species aren’t going extinct,” Stevens stresses, “but if this is happening everywhere, we are moving towards much more species-poor grasslands, and we have no idea what the knock-on effects of that will be.”

So last year, Stevens, her UK colleagues David Gowing, Nancy Dise and Owen Mountford, and a team of experts from Germany, the Netherlands and France, embarked on a Europe wide project, part of the European Science Foundation (ESF) EuroDIVERSITY Programme. The project’s aim is to see if the effects are the same on a wider range of grasslands, across the entire Atlantic side of Europe. “The low countries and northern Germany are the epicentre of European nitrogen deposition,” says Gowing.

…The team has started experiments to see if they can establish how extra nitrogen has these effects. They hope to predict what will happen in the future. “Nitrogen deposition in Europe probably peaked in the 1990s, and is coming down now in many places,” says Gowing. But it may not be appropriate for policymakers to relax. “Having been accumulating nitrogen for 40 years,” he continues, “we might be near the edge of the cliff where communities will suddenly change. Perhaps we’ll be able to say: you have another five years of accumulating at this rate, so now is the time to act.”

What should be done? “We are hoping for a clear signal that you can maintain species richness [under nitrogen deposition] by biomass stripping,” says Gowing. That means extra mowing and grazing. “If we find one, we can offer a management strategy for nature conservation.”...