Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID TWRI-Buskirk-FY24

Constraining How Riverbank Microbial Communities Influence Watershed Scale Denitrification

Institute: Texas
Year Established: 2023 Start Date: 2023-09-01 End Date: 2024-08-31
Total Federal Funds: $7,500 Total Non-Federal Funds: $15,376

Principal Investigators: Peter Knappett

Project Summary: Excess nutrients (nitrate and ammonium) can trigger toxic algal blooms in rivers and costal regions they flow into. Rivers can control nutrient concentrations to some extent by microbe communities in riverbanks. These microbes consume nitrate and excrete nitrogen gas, removing nitrate from riverwater (a reaction called denitrification). However, river management needs knowledge of how this microbial scale denitrification impacts watershed scale nitrate losses and gains. Hence, my project goal is to (1) characterize the microbe communities in a riverbank, (2) understand how microbe denitrification is controlled by flood events, and (3) scale denitrification reactions to a river-scale field site to understand. I will use a physical scale model of the Brazos Riverbank to mimic different flooding regimes that mix river and groundwater on natural sediments in a series of experiments. I will scale the experiment results to nutrient concentrations I will measure along the Brazos River under selected flooding events.