Abstract:
Land use modifications have led to both the intensification of agricultural land and the urbanization that we have been seeing throughout New Zealand since colonization. These land use trends can significantly impact on freshwater stream ecology, with additional nutrients, contaminants and sediments often having degrading effects through loading and deposition. These factors can essentially lead to the streams becoming eutrophic, lacking oxygen and possessing increased aquatic growth. Monitoring these nutrient and sediment controls is vital for understanding stream processes and how these can be affected. This study reflects on nutrient concentrations, like phosphorus and nitrogen, which have shown levels of excess nutrients across many stream environments. Phosphorus will be more greatly covered, identifying nutrient fluxes with the water column and within the sediment, finding the point where phosphorus is neither adsorbed or desorbed, how the phosphorus is bound within sediments, and at what nutrient uptake capacity varying streams have leading to their saturation point of phosphorus. Keywords: nutrients loading, sediment deposition, freshwater streams, land use change, equilibrium point, phosphorus fractionation, uptake capacity