Human Impact on Erodable Phosphorus and Eutrophication: A Global Perspective

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Human actions—mining phosphorus (P) and transporting it in fertilizers, animal feeds, agricultural crops, and other products—are altering the global P cycle, causing P to accumulate in some of the world’s soil. Increasing P levels in the soil elevate the potential P runoff to aquatic ecosystems (Fluck et al. 1992, NRC 1993, USEPA 1996). Using a global budget approach, we estimate the increase in net P storage in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems to be at least 75% greater than preindustrial levels of storage. We calculated an agricultural mass balance (budget), which indicated that a large portion of this P accumulation occurs in agricultural soils. Separate P budgets of the agricultural areas of developing and developed countries show that the rate of P accumulation is decreasing in developed nations but increasing in developing nations.