A Systematic Review of Nutrient Fluxes within an Agricultural Watershed

A search on the topic of nutrient fluxes in agricultural watersheds was done using Thomson Reuters Web of Science to determine the present primary and peer-reviewed research available. The search was done on November 20, 2014 using Boolean search methods with the terms: “nutrient flux*” (topic), AND “watershed*” (title), AND “agricult*” (topic); which resulted in 60 relevant articles found. The 60 articles found were then further refined in two stages. The first stage is more brief, checking the title and abstract for relevance; articles that are duplicates or not written in the English language was removed as well. Articles not excluded in this initial refinement went through a more detailed examination to test for relevance. Overall, in order to be deemed relevant, articles must be studying some flux of nutrients within an agricultural watershed; if these two requirements were not met, then the article was excluded. Articles excluded within the second refinement stage usually involved studies that focussed on models testing nutrient flux, or the study areas was not focussed on agriculture. A total of 35 articles remained relevant after the two stages of refinement.