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The concurrent reduction in acid deposition and increase in precipitation impact stream solute dynamics in complex ways that make predictions of future water quality difficult. To understand how changes in acid deposition and precipitation have influenced dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and nitrogen (N) loading to streams, we investigated trends from 1991 to 2018 in stream concentrations (DOC, ~3,800 measurements), dissolved organic nitrogen (DON, ~1,160 measurements), and dissolved inorganic N (DIN, ~2,130 measurements) in a forested watershed in Vermont, USA. Our analysis included concentration-discharge (C-Q) relationships and Seasonal Mann-Kendall tests on long-term, flow-adjusted concentrations. To understand whether hydrologic flushing and changes in acid deposition influenced long-term patterns by liberating DOC and dissolved N from watershed soils, we measured their concentrations in the leachate of 108 topsoil cores of 5 cm diameter that we flushed with solutions simulating high and low acid deposition during four different seasons. Our results indicate that DOC and DON often co-varied in both the long-term stream dataset and the soil core experiment. Additionally, leachate from winter soil cores produced especially high concentrations of all three solutes. This seasonal signal was consistent with C-Q relation showing that organic materials (e.g., DOC and DON), which accumulate during winter, are flushed into streams during spring snowmelt. Acid deposition had opposite effects on DOC and DON compared to DIN in the soil core experiment. Low acid deposition solutions, which mimic present day precipitation, produced the highest DOC and DON leachate concentrations. Conversely, high acid deposition solutions generally produced the highest DIN leachate concentrations. These results are consistent with the increasing trend in stream DOC concentrations and generally decreasing trend in stream DIN we observed in the long-term data. These results suggest that the impact of acid deposition on the liberation of soil carbon (C) and N differed for DOC and DON vs. DIN, and these impacts were reflected in long-term stream chemistry patterns. As watersheds continue to recover from acid deposition, stream C:N ratios will likely continue to increase, with important consequences for stream metabolism and biogeochemical processes. 

Arid ecosystems are known to be sensitive to climate change. The Jornada Basin in the USA, as one representative of arid land, has suffered from land degradation in recent decades. In order to disentangle the climate–vegetation feedback, we analyzed the vegetation dynamics under the effects of climate change via a mathematical model based on the reaction–diffusion mechanism. Using this model, we conducted a sensitive analysis of climate factors and concluded that the ecosystem might experience a catastrophic shift with the climatic deterioration. We considered the non-local interaction term to explain the competition among plants. Additionally, the PLR (power law range) metric was used to quantify the extent of the degradation and to compare the results of the vegetation patterns from the remote sensing data and the simulations. From the results, this model could simulate the trends of land degradation in this area. We found that the land degradation could be mainly attributed to climate changes in recent years. This approach suggests that vegetation patterns can provide hints as to whether the ecosystem is approaching desertification. These results can help with mapping vulnerable arid areas around the world through model simulation and satellite images.