Nutrient Inputs and Outputs for the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario

The purpose of this research project is to quantify nitrogen and phosphorus flows through a mixed urban and rural area. There is particular interest to find the ways in which increasing population densities in the Greater Toronto Area are impacting nutrient flows across Southern Ontario’s urban/rural continuum and how changing nutrient dynamics may lead to increasingly impaired water quality in Lake Ontario and beyond. This work looks to establish the “metabolism” of the Greater Toronto Area in 2011 through the analysis of the various inputs and outputs of the system that includes factors such as food consumption, fertilizer usage, crop production, and wastewater treatment plants outputs. This data set is collected for the project titled "Lake Futures: Enhancing Adaptive Capacity and Resilience of Lakes and Their Watersheds". Lake Futures is a Pillar 3 project under the Global Water Futures Program funded by Canada First Research Excellence Fund.

In this work, a mass balance approach was used to quantify the flow of nutrients through urban, suburban, and rural areas of the Greater Toronto Area. A wide range of factors are considered, including human behaviour, domestic animals, stormwater management, and wastewater treatment processes. The necessary data from Census Canada and municipalities (such as wastewater treatment reports) were gathered and consolidated manually to consider missing information due to sampling or privacy issues. Maps were generated in ArcGIS to spatially locate inputs such as fertilizer (separately for residential lawns, agricultural fields, and parks) and food consumption (humans, pets, and livestock) as well as outputs such as crop production and wastewater treatment plant outfalls. The land divisions (urban, suburban, and rural) were determined using land use maps and population density in ArcGIS.

Basu, N., Samson, M.I., and Van Meter, K. (2019). Nutrient Inputs and Outputs for the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario. Canadian Cryospheric Information Network (CCIN). Unpublished Data. Additional Citation: Samson, M., K.J. Van Meter, N.B. Basu. Urban Metabolism of the Greater Toronto Area: A Study of Nitrogen and Phosphorus Across an Urban, Suburban, and Rural Continuum, Masters Thesis, University of Waterloo.

https://www.polardata.ca/pdcsearch/PDCSearchDOI.jsp?doi_id=12993