Sweet spots for nitrogen restoration in a coastal watershed

Abstract

Reducing nitrogen delivery to coastal waters is a “wicked problem” involving tradeoffs in environmental, economic and equity domains. Because these tradeoffs arise from spatial and temporal complexities in sources and sinks of this element, we hypothesized that a transdisciplinary focus on disproportionality could allow for the identification of “hot” or “sweet” spots where multiple factors converge to create opportunities to control nitrogen flux. We applied this approach to the Baltimore, MD USA region by mapping stream reaches with high nitrogen concentrations, hydrologic conditions amenable to stream restoration, high willingness to pay for restoration projects, and high social need for restoration, and subsequently identifying locations where these factors converge to create sweet spots. Our analysis suggests that sweet spots that optimize environmental, economic, and equity components of sustainability may be rare. The desire to bundle multiple benefits in the budgeting for environmental interventions such as stream restoration may create a sub-optimal distribution of these interventions in a sustainability context.