Springs drive downstream nitrate export from artificially-drained agricultural headwater catchments.

Excessive nutrient loading from small agricultural headwaters can substantially degrade downstream water quality and ecological conditions. But, our understanding of the scales and locations to implement nutrient attenuation tools within these catchments is poor. To help inform farm- and catchment-scale management, we quantified nitrate export in nine one-kilometre-long lowland agricultural headwaters fed by tile and open tributary drains in a region with high groundwater nitrate (<1 to >15 mg L NO-N) over four years.

Anthropogenic and natural sources of acidity and metals and their influence on the structure of stream food webs.

We compared food web structure in 20 streams with either anthropogenic or natural sources of acidity and metals or circumneutral water chemistry in New Zealand. Community and diet analysis indicated that mining streams receiving anthropogenic inputs of acidic and metal-rich drainage had much simpler food webs (fewer species, shorter food chains, less links) than those in naturally acidic, naturally high metal, and circumneutral streams. Food webs of naturally high metal streams were structurally similar to those in mining streams, lacking fish predators and having few species.

Heavy metals: confounding factors in the response of New Zealand freshwater fish assemblages to natural and anthropogenic acidity.

Acidification of freshwaters is a global phenomenon, occurring both through natural leaching of organic acids and through human activities from industrial emissions and mining. The West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand, has both naturally acidic and acid mine drainage (AMD) streams enabling us to investigate the response of fish communities to a gradient of acidity in the presence and absence of additional stressors such as elevated concentrations of heavy metals. We surveyed a total of 42 streams ranging from highly acidic (pH 3.