Effects of Climate Change on River and Groundwater Nutrient Inputs to the Coastal Ocean

Author(s)

• Christina M. Richardson
• Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink
• Shea Wyatt
• Annie Bourbonnais, University of South CarolinaFollow
• Vanessa Hatje
• Claudia Frey
• Tina Sanders
• Diana E. Varela
• Adina Paytan

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Rivers and groundwater are major sources of nutrients to the global coastal ocean. Climate change is expected to impact nutrient fluxes from river basins and coastal aquifers through alterations to both hydrological and nutrient cycling processes. In this Review, we identify and summarize how climate change impacts, such as changes in precipitation, increased cryosphere melt, and sea level rise, will affect water discharge and nutrient concentrations in rivers and coastal groundwater, which ultimately control nutrient inputs to the coastal ocean. We also document key limitations in the current understanding of climate-related changes to nutrient fluxes, especially in coastal groundwater basins. The impacts of climate change will interact with local human impacts, highlighting the need for studies spanning local to global scales to better understand and improve predictions of future nutrient fluxes from these hydrological pathways.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02594-6

Publication Info

Published in Communications Earth and Environment, Volume 6, 2025.

Rights

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included i  the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

APA Citation

Richardson, C. M., Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink, Wyatt, S., Bourbonnais, A., Hatje, V., Frey, C., Sanders, T., Varela, D. E., & Paytan, A. (2025). Effects of climate change on river and groundwater nutrient inputs to the coastal ocean. Communications Earth & Environment, 6.https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02594-6