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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2025 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved.Biological nitrogen fixation is a key driver of global primary production and climate. Decades of effort have repeatedly updated nitrogen fixation estimates for terrestrial and open ocean systems, yet other aquatic systems in between have largely been ignored. Here we present an evaluation of nitrogen fixation for inland and coastal waters. We demonstrate that water column and sediment nitrogen fixation is ubiquitous across these diverse aquatic habitats, with rates ranging six orders of magnitude. We conservatively estimate that, despite accounting for less than 10% of the global surface area, inland and coastal aquatic systems fix 40 (30 to 54) teragrams of nitrogen per year, equivalent to 15% of the nitrogen fixed on land and in the open ocean. Inland systems contribute more than half of this biological nitrogen fixation.
Author(s): Fulweiler RWF, Rinehart S, Taylor J, Kelly MC, Berberich ME, Ray NE, Oczkowski A, Balint S, Benavides M, Church MJ, Loeks B, Newell S, Olofsson M, Oppong JC, Roley SS, Vizza C, Wilson ST, Chowdhury S, Groffman P, Scott JT, Marcarelli AM
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Science
Year: 2025
Volume: 388
Issue: 6752
Pages: 1205-1209
Online publication date: 12/06/2025
Acceptance date: 16/04/2025
Date deposited: 15/07/2025
ISSN (print): 0036-8075
ISSN (electronic): 1095-9203
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
URL: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt1511
DOI: 10.1126/science.adt1511
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/q5jk-r974
Data Access Statement: The nitrogen fixation observations used in this study have been deposited to the Environmental Data Initiative (https://portal.edirepository.org/nis/mapbrowse?packageid=edi.1759.2). The code used to perform global scalingand generate the figures in this manuscript is available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15546493).
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