Extreme rainfall is intensifying globally as the climate continues to warm. Yet how such events affect coastal water quality and potentially influence assessments of water quality improvement remains poorly understood.

Changing climatic conditions that can alter physical characteristics of surface waters may limit the effectiveness of conventional approaches to nutrient management. This study evaluated the competing effects of nutrient loads and changing salinity on chlorophyll-a dynamics in Tampa Bay (Florida, USA).

Degradation of groundwater and surface water quality by excess pollutant loading remains one of the most persistent and costly environmental management challenges in the US. To meet applicable water quality standards and prevent excess pollutants in waterbodies, the Clean Water Act requires that total maximum daily loads (TMDLs), which define the maximum allowable daily pollutant load to a waterbody, are implemented.

Contamination by nutrients, major ions, and metals poses a major threat to global water sustainability. Understanding how these pollutants vary across time and space requires long-term monitoring and robust statistical approaches. Traditional methods, however, often struggle to account for streamflow variability, seasonality, and nonlinear responses.

As water-quality challenges intensify, the widely used Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS) method offers an adaptable and practical framework for global water-quality science and management.

Efforts to constrain the negative environmental impacts of excess nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are costly and challenging, due in part to inconsistent reporting of nutrient sources at temporal and spatial scales relevant for local decision making.

Vegetated buffer strips (VBS) are widely used to mitigate agricultural non-point source pollution yet reported retention efficiencies vary considerably across different landscapes. We synthesized 409 observations extracted from 91 peer-reviewed publications to evaluate critical determinants of VBS retention efficiency for agricultural runoff, focusing specifically on total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), and total suspended solids (TSS).

River water quality degradation is a prevailing problem in coastal China with intensifying human-nature interaction. However, the spatial and temporal dynamics of water quality and their drivers remain poorly understood.

Low dissolved oxygen (DO) conditions pose a persistent threat to aquatic life in coastal ecosystems. In Chesapeake Bay, DO criteria are used to evaluate restoration progress, but traditional assessment methods—such as binary pass/fail outcomes and attainment deficit metrics—can obscure important spatial and temporal variability across tidal segments.

Many waterbodies undergo nutrient decline, called oligotrophication, globally, but a comprehensive dataset to understand ecosystem responses is lacking. The OLIGOTREND database comprises multi-decadal chlorophyll a and nutrient time series from rivers, lakes, and estuaries with 4.3 million observations from 1894 unique measurement locations. The database provides empirical evidence for oligotrophication responses with a spatial and temporal coverage that exceeds previous efforts.