About

Nathan Hall is an Associate Research Professor and the Director of the Morehead City Field Site within the Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in Marine Sciences from UNC-Chapel Hill, obtained in 2009. His research focuses on understanding the top down and bottom up drivers of phytoplankton biomass and community composition in lakes, rivers, and estuaries. He is particularly interested in how natural ecosystem characteristics such as residence time, grazer communities, and vertical mixing regimes interact with nutrient and light availability to influence bloom dynamics, phytoplankton community composition, and water quality conditions. Recently, he has also become interested in factors, including phytoplankton blooms, that govern light availability for submerged aquatic vegetation.

Research topics

• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Biology
• Geology
• Oceanography
• Geography
• Meteorology
• Chemistry
• Environmental resource management

Selected publications

• A general pattern of trade-offs between ecosystem resistance and resilience to tropical cyclones

  Science Advances · 2022 · 64 citations

  • Ecology
  • Environmental science
  • Oceanography

  = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosystems will respond to future disturbance regimes. Data were grouped by ecosystems (fresh water, salt water, terrestrial, and wetland) and response categories (biogeochemistry, hydrography, mobile biota, sedentary fauna, and vascular plants). We observed a repeated pattern of trade-offs between resistance and resilience across analyses. These patterns are likely the outcomes of evolutionary adaptation, they conform to disturbance theories, and they indicate that consistent rules may govern ecosystem susceptibility to tropical cyclones.

  DOI

• Contributions of external nutrient loading and internal cycling to cyanobacterial bloom dynamics in Lake Taihu, China: Implications for nutrient management

  Limnology and Oceanography · 2021 · 194 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Ecology
  • Biology

  Abstract Harmful cyanobacterial blooms (CyanoHABs) are linked to increasing anthropogenic nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) inputs. However, CyanoHABs in many large lakes continue despite extensive abatement efforts, mostly focused on external P loading. Internal nutrient cycling can modify nutrient availability and limitation; thus, understanding the relative importance of external vs. internal nutrient loading is essential for developing effective mitigation strategies for CyanoHABs. We estimated long‐term nutrient budgets for Lake Taihu, China, from mass balance models using extensive monitoring of input and output nutrient data from 2005 to 2018 to quantify contributions from internal nutrient loading. The nutrient mass balance showed that 9% and 63% of annual external N and P inputs, respectively, were retained in the lake. Denitrification removed 54% of external N loading and can thus help explain rapid decreases in lake N concentrations and summer N limitation. Water column regeneration can help sustain CyanoHABs over the short term and contributed 38–58% of potential demand for summer‐fall, Microcystis ‐dominated blooms. Internal P release contributed 23–90% of CyanoHABs P demand, although Taihu was a net P sink on an annual scale. Our results show that internal nutrient cycling helps sustain CyanoHABs in Taihu, despite reductions in external nutrient inputs. Furthermore, N is leaving the lake faster than P, thereby creating persistent N limitation. Therefore, parallel reductions in external N loading, along with P, will be most effective in reducing CyanoHABs and accelerate the recovery process in this and other large, shallow lakes.

  DOI

• Recent increases of rainfall and flooding from tropical cyclones (TCs) in North Carolina (USA): implications for organic matter and nutrient cycling in coastal watersheds

  Biogeochemistry · 2020 · 63 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Oceanography
  • Ecology
  DOI

• A Research Framework to Integrate Cross-Ecosystem Responses to Tropical Cyclones

  BioScience · 2020 · 58 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Environmental resource management
  • Ecology

  Abstract Tropical cyclones play an increasingly important role in shaping ecosystems. Understanding and generalizing their responses is challenging because of meteorological variability among storms and its interaction with ecosystems. We present a research framework designed to compare tropical cyclone effects within and across ecosystems that: a) uses a disaggregating approach that measures the responses of individual ecosystem components, b) links the response of ecosystem components at fine temporal scales to meteorology and antecedent conditions, and c) examines responses of ecosystem using a resistance–resilience perspective by quantifying the magnitude of change and recovery time. We demonstrate the utility of the framework using three examples of ecosystem response: gross primary productivity, stream biogeochemical export, and organismal abundances. Finally, we present the case for a network of sentinel sites with consistent monitoring to measure and compare ecosystem responses to cyclones across the United States, which could help improve coastal ecosystem resilience.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hans W. Paerl

  37 shared

• Boqiang Qin

  18 shared

• Karen L. Rossignol

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  15 shared

• Hai Xu

  Institute of Solid State Physics

  14 shared

• Guangwei Zhu

  13 shared

• Hans W. Paerl

  11 shared

• Alexandria G. Hounshell

  Virginia Tech

  8 shared

• Benjamin L. Peierls

  8 shared

Labs

• Earth, Marine and Environmental SciencesPI

Education

• PhD, Marine Sciences

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2009

Similar researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Barry M. Popkinh-170
• Cynthia Bulikh-134
• Doug Perkinsh-115
• Paul Watkinsh-107
• Linda Adairh-106