{"id":7438,"date":"2015-04-20T05:49:35","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T10:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7438"},"modified":"2015-04-20T05:49:35","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T10:49:35","slug":"with-too-much-of-a-good-thing-europe-tackles-excess-nitrogen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7438","title":{"rendered":"With Too Much of a Good Thing, Europe Tackles Excess Nitrogen"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Too Much of a Good Thing,\u00a0Europe Tackles Excess Nitrogen<\/a><\/h3>\n

In Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and other countries, European governments are beginning to push farmers, industry, and municipalities to cut back on fertilizers and other sources of nitrogen that are causing serious environmental harm.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

by christian schwagerl<\/span><\/p>\n

Only seconds after Claudia Wiedner drops the metallic rod into the gray waters of Lake Scharm\u00fctzel, 30 miles southeast of Berlin, the probe starts sending signals back to her computer. On a cold, foggy day in March, Wiedner, a limnologist at the Brandenburg University of Cottbus-Senftenburg, and a research technician are out on the water in their small vessel to investigate nitrogen pollution.<\/p>\n

The water samples they pull up tell an encouraging tale \u2014 at least in this lake. “We have been measuring reactive nitrogen and phosphorus in this\u00a0<\/span>lake since 1993 and what we see is a change for the better \u2014 levels have dropped considerably,” Wiedner says. Her colleague, Ingo Henschke, an avid diver and former fisherman, can attest to this, saying that better sewage treatment and a decrease in nearby farming have significantly improved water quality.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was able to document a return of large swaths of stoneworts algae and the rich water life they sustain,” Henschke says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But Scharm\u00fctzel Lake is an exception in Germany \u2014 it serves as a kind of gold standard for positive changes. For like the rest of Europe and much of the world, Germany\u2019s waterways are suffering from a surplus of nitrogen that is spread across fields as fertilizer, pours off of farms where livestock and chickens are raised, or flows out of factories, sewage systems, and wastewater treatment plants. The result is harmful algal blooms in lakes, dead zones in oceans, and an impoverishment of terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity \u2014 problems that the European Union is now trying to address.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Too Much of a Good Thing,\u00a0Europe Tackles Excess Nitrogen In Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and other countries, European governments are beginning to push farmers, industry, and municipalities to cut back on fertilizers and other sources of nitrogen that are causing serious environmental harm. by christian schwagerl Only seconds after Claudia Wiedner drops the metallic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,72,4846,281,299,4844,4574,4845],"class_list":["post-7438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-biodiversity","tag-dead-zones","tag-europe","tag-farming","tag-fertilizer","tag-nitrogen","tag-water-contamination"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7439,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7438\/revisions\/7439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}