Ecosystems overloaded with nitrogen, courtesy humans

WASHINGTON - A new study has revealed that humans are overloading ecosystems with nitrogen through the burning of fossil fuels and an increase in nitrogen-producing industrial and agricultural activities.

While nitrogen is an element that is essential to life, it is an environmental scourge at high levels.

According to the study, excess nitrogen that is contributed by human activities pollutes fresh waters and coastal zones, and may contribute to climate change. Nevertheless, such ecological damage could be reduced by the adoption of time-honored sustainable practices.

The nitrogen cycle-which has existed for billions of years — transforms non-biologically useful forms of nitrogen found in the atmosphere into various biologically useful forms of nitrogen that are needed by living things to create proteins, DNA and RNA, and by plants to grow and photosynthesize.

The transformation of biologically useful forms of nitrogen to useful forms of nitrogen is known as nitrogen fixation.

Mostly mediated by bacteria that live in legume plant roots and soils, nitrogen fixation and other components of the nitrogen cycle weave and wind through the atmosphere, plants, subsurface plant roots, and soils; the nitrogen cycle involves many natural feedback relationships between plants and microorganisms.

According to the study, since pre-biotic times, the nitrogen cycle has gone through several major phases. The cycle was initially controlled by slow volcanic processes and lightning and then by anaerobic organisms as biological activity started. By about 2.5 billion years ago, as molecular oxygen appeared on Earth, a linked suite of microbial processes evolved to form the modern nitrogen cycle.

But the start of the 20th century, human contributions to the nitrogen cycle began skyrocketing.

“In fact, no phenomenon has probably impacted the nitrogen cycle more than human inputs of nitrogen into the cycle in the last 2.5 billion years,” says Paul Falkowski of Rutgers University, a member of the research team.

“Altogether, human activities currently contribute twice as much terrestrial nitrogen fixation as natural sources, and provide around 45 percent of the total biological useful nitrogen produced annually on Earth,” says Falkowski.

Much of the human contributions of nitrogen into ecosystems come from an 800 percent increase in the use of nitrogen fertilizers from 1960 to 2000.

The study appears in the October 8, 2010 edition of Science. (ANI)