Groundwater-dependent ecosystems face a greater threat of pollution. In many cases groundwater can become polluted through toxins, or even just excessive amounts of certain nutrients seeping down to the water table. This polluting of the groundwater can have many different effects on the related ecosystems in the case of an estuary in Cape Cod it was noted that an influx of new nitrogen had come from septic tank fields in the groundwater’s flow path. Increased levels of nitrogen in aquatic ecosystems can cause eutrophication which is the process of excessive introduction of nutrients causing an abundance of plant growth which can result
Liebig's law of the minimum Liebig's law of the minimum Liebig's law of the minimum, often simply called Liebig's law or the law of the minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1828) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). The law has also been applied to biological populations and ecosystem models for factors such as sunlight or mineral nutrients. This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not