Planet Ark : Lowly Streams Play Big Role In Fighting Pollution: "CHICAGO - A meandering stream appears to play a powerful role in filtering out pollutants like nitrogen, and understanding this role could help prevent oxygen-depleting blooms of algae that threaten fish and shellfish downstream, researchers said on Wednesday.
The research was part of a project to determine whether rivers actively process pollutants and remove them from the ecosystem, or simply act as drain pipes that flush polluted waters into lakes or out to sea.
'They are most definitely processors,' said Stephen Hamilton, an aquatic ecologist at Michigan State University in Lansing, who led one of several teams studying the problem.
The study, which appears in the journal Nature, looked at how 72 streams across eight regions in the United States and Puerto Rico neutralize nitrogen.
'There is a remarkable amount of processing that takes place,' Hamilton said in a telephone interview. 'We were able to see how streams vary in that nitrogen processing.'
If overloaded, however, they found the streams were less efficient at removing the nitrogen that enters the stream through agricultural runoff, acid rain and human waste.
Too much nitrogen in the water can cause excessive growth of algae and aquatic plants in lakes and coastal marine waters, which deplete oxygen stores, k"
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