The Net Anthropogenic Nitrogen Inputs (NANI) Toolbox

Overview

With funding from the NOAA Coastal Hypoxia Research Program (CHRP), we have developed a set of tools, the NANI calculator toolbox, which allows the user to calculate NANI (Net Anthropogenic Nitrogen Inputs; Howarth et al. 1996; Boyer et al. 2002) from commonly available databases downloadable from the Internet. The toolbox is composed of a set of tools that:

(1) calculate the proportions of various political boundaries falling into watersheds (“NANI-GIS tools”),

(2) extract and organize relevant data downloaded from web-based datasets to be used by the budgeting tool (“NANI-extraction tools”), and

(3) calculate the components of NANI and other relevant items possibly used for other purposes, for example relevant inputs to ReNuMa (“NANI-budgeting tools”).

The toolbox is designed so that the only input the user needs to provide is a map of watershed(s) of interest. Other inputs, such as agricultural census data, are either included in the toolbox package or are readily available on the Internet. At present, the tools are designed for US datasets only, but we hope to expand its use to global datasets in the near future (see NANI toolbox documentation).

The NANI toolbox documentation describes how each of the tools in the toolbox works, using the NANI calculation of US watersheds as an example. Figure 1 below shows an overview of the NANI calculation in this example. Note that the specific calculations may be altered depending on the availability of datasets. For example, in this example the watershed population is estimated based on the county level census data. If desired, however, the same calculation can be done at the census block level using appropriate data.

Figure 1. Overview of NANI calculator toolbox applied to NE US watersheds.

For more information, contact: nitrogen@cornell.edu.

NANI Toolbox documentation (PDF)	NANI Toolbox with data (static version,zipped format, contains data for the US and Excel 2007 worksheets, ~16.8 Mb)
NANI Budgeting Tool (Static, Excel worksheet~17.8 Mb)	NANI Toolbox with data (dynamic version,zipped format, contains data for the US and Excel 2007 worksheets, ~17.5Mb)
NANI Extraction tool – Ag Census, Crops, 1987-97 (Zipped format, ~265 Mb)	NANI GIS tool (ArcGIS .mxd file), ~166 Kb)
NANI Extraction tool – Ag Census, Crops, 2002-07(Zipped format, ~181 Mb)	NANI Extraction tool – US Census (Zipped format, ~4.2 Mb)
NANI Extraction tool – Ag Census, Animals, 1987-97(Zipped format, ~266 Mb)	NANI Extraction tool – Ag Census, Animals, 2002-07(Zipped format, ~183 Mb)
References	NANI Extraction tool – USGS Nutrient Input Estimates (Zipped format, ~4.9 Mb)
Links	NANI Extraction tool – CMAQ N deposition Estimates (Zipped format, ~31.1 Mb)

Support for development of the NANI Toolbox has been provided by:

Current work is being supported by NOAA award NA05NOS478120 from the NOAA Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research, Coastal Hypoxia Research Program, to D. Scavia, G. Helfand, R. Howarth, R. Alexander and D. Breitberg.