Otero Pérez, Xosé LoisPeña Lastra, Saúl de laPérez Alberti, AugustoOsório Ferreira, TiagoHuerta-Diaz, Miguel Ángel2018-06-112018-06-112018-01-23Otero, X., De La Peña-Lastra, S., Pérez-Alberti, A., Ferreira, T., & Huerta-Diaz, M. (2018). Seabird colonies as important global drivers in the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Nature Communications, 9(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02446-8http://hdl.handle.net/10347/16780Seabirds drastically transform the environmental conditions of the sites where they establish their breeding colonies via soil, sediment, and water eutrophication (hereafter termed ornitheutrophication). Here, we report worldwide amounts of total nitrogen (N) and total phosphorus (P) excreted by seabirds using an inventory of global seabird populations applied to a bioenergetics model. We estimate these fluxes to be 591 Gg N y−1 and 99 Gg P y−1, respectively, with the Antarctic and Southern coasts receiving the highest N and P inputs. We show that these inputs are of similar magnitude to others considered in global N and P cycles, with concentrations per unit of surface area in seabird colonies among the highest measured on the Earth’s surface. Finally, an important fraction of the total excreted N (72.5 Gg y−1) and P (21.8 Gg y−1) can be readily solubilized, increasing their short-term bioavailability in continental and coastal waters located near the seabird colonieseng© The Author(s) 2018. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/Atribución 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Element cyclesEnvironmental impactjournal article10.1038/s41467-017-02446-82041-1723open access