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Stable Isotopes Reveal Nitrogen Loading to Lake Tanganyika from Remote Shoreline Villages

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Abstract

Access to safe water is an ongoing challenge in rural areas in Tanzania where communities often lack access to improved sanitation. Methods to detect contamination of surface water bodies, such as monitoring nutrient concentrations and bacterial counts, are time consuming and results can be highly variable in space and time. On the northeast shore of Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania, the low population density coupled with the high potential for dilution in the lake necessitates the development of a sensitive method for detecting contamination in order to avoid human health concerns. We investigated the potential use of nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes of snail tissues to detect anthropogenic nutrient loading along the northeast shore of Lake Tanganyika. δ15N of snails was positively related to human population size in the nearest village, but only for villages with >4000 inhabitants. The areal footprint of villages within their watershed was also significantly correlated with snail δ15N, while agricultural land use and natural vegetation were not. Dissolved nutrient concentrations were not significantly different between village and reference sites. Our results indicate that nitrogen isotopes provide a sensitive index of local nutrient loading that can be used to monitor contamination of oligotrophic aquatic environments with low surrounding population densities.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation grants DEB-0842253 (YV) and DEB-1030242 (PBM) and the Department of Biology at Wright State University. We thank Ellen Hamann, Evan Childress, and Kim Sparks for assistance with chemical analyses, and members of the Lake Tanganyika Ecosystem Project team for help in the field. We thank the JGI and the Tanzania Fishery Research Institute for logistical assistance with field sampling, and Dr. Rashid Tamatamah and the University of Dar es Salaam for research clearance. We gratefully recognize The Nature Conservancy’s Africa Program for sharing watershed delineations. We thank two anonymous reviewers whose comments improved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Wright State University, 3640 Colonel Glenn Highway, Dayton, OH, 45435, USA

    Brianne Kelly & Yvonne Vadeboncoeur

  2. The Jane Goodall Institute, Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education Program, PO Box 1182, Kigoma, Tanzania

    Emmanuel Mtiti

  3. Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin, 680 North Park Street, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Peter B. McIntyre

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  1. Brianne Kelly
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  2. Emmanuel Mtiti
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  3. Peter B. McIntyre
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  4. Yvonne Vadeboncoeur
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Correspondence to Brianne Kelly.

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Kelly, B., Mtiti, E., McIntyre, P.B. et al. Stable Isotopes Reveal Nitrogen Loading to Lake Tanganyika from Remote Shoreline Villages. Environmental Management 59, 264–273 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-016-0787-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-016-0787-y

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