A seasonal survey of surface water habitats within the River Spey basin, Scotland: major nutrient properties

Abstract

1. Current monitoring strategies of governmental organizations tend to be focused on relatively large flowing and standing waters, and until recently those polluted by point sources. Consequently areas of high conservation interest tend to be understudied, and defining reference conditions, as required by current legislation, is difficult to achieve. 2. In order to address this imbalance, water samples have been collected and analysed once in each of four seasons during 2003 from 72 locations within a 100 km2 area of the oligotrophic River Spey catchment in NE Scotland. The sampling design included examples of running water (headwater streams and the main rivers) and standing water (lochs, lochans, pools, ditches, backwaters, bogs). Altitude ranged from 220 to 980 m and incorporated a climatic regime from cool temperate to sub-alpine. Each sampling campaign targeted low-flow conditions to evaluate steady-state nutrient concentrations. 3. Concentrations of the major soluble nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus demonstrated high spatial and temporal variability, with soluble organic and molybdate unreactive forms generally being dominant. Concentrations of ammonium-N, nitrate-N and soluble reactive phosphorus were extremely small, with 50% of samples falling below 8, 5 and 1 µg L−1, respectively, during spring and summer. 4. Sampling sites were grouped either by water-body type or by the properties of their immediate biophysical zone. Together these two groupings explained 33–38% of the variance in water chemistry. Certain changes were detectable across most habitats and biophysical zones. 5. A decline in the concentration of nitrate that occurred in reaches downstream from certain headwater streams draining the mountain areas indicated the potential for its within-stream utilization. Inorganic N dynamics differed between small streams and large rivers. 6. Landscape-scale patterns were recorded in spring and summer nutrient availability with inorganic N and P thresholds (arbitrarily defined) of 10 and 1 µg L−1, respectively. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.