Scott W. Nixon

Scott W. Nixon (1943 – May 21, 2012) was an ecosystem ecologist whose research primarily focused on nitrogen and eutrophication in coastal and estuarine ecosystems. He was the first to clearly define coastal eutrophication. Nixon was a faculty member of the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography from 1969 until his death. Throughout his life, he also served important roles in many organizations and committees, including as the director of Rhode Island Sea Grant, editor-in-chief of Estuaries,

Education In 1965, Nixon obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology from the University of Delaware. Under the mentorship of Howard T. Odum, he received a doctorate in Botany from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1970.

Career Identified by the dean John Knauss as having potential, Nixon was hired by the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography as a research associate a year prior to obtaining his doctorate and began working as an assistant professor in 1970. He was appointed the UNESCO/Cousteau Chair in Coastal Ecology and Global Assessment in 2004 Nixon had a reputation for his skill in communicating difficult scientific concepts to a general audience and recontextualizing research to find where it fit in the bigger picture. eelgrass, and fish. Bissel Cove and other locations throughout Narragansett Bay were frequent sites of interest. The collaboration between Nixon and Oviatt on a whole-ecosystem study of Bissel Cove was one of the first whole-ecosystem studies published.

In 1972, Nixon and Oviatt began to more closely study carbon and nitrogen in Bissel Cove. After this, Nixon began to depart from mostly studying metabolisms of specific coastal marine species to studying nutrient dynamics in coastal marine environments, especially their sediments.

In 1977, Nixon published a book with fellow field ecologist James Kremer of the University of Connecticut on using computers to create an ecosystem model for Narragansett Bay. The book, A Coastal Marine Ecosystem, was intended to help connect ecologists with numerical modeling.

In some of his earliest work on eutrophic systems, Nixon published a report for the Rhode Island Water Resources center on the Pettaquamscutt River’s Upper Pond in 1981. He delved further into the nitrogen cycle and eutrophication with several papers during the early 1980s, oftentimes second author to one of his graduate students, like Sybil Seitzinger and Veronica Berounsky.

In the later 1980s, Nixon began to broaden his scope. In his earlier career, Nixon rarely strayed from studies outside the Narragansett Bay area, but he began to perform a study on Chesapeake Bay, wrote a literature review on lakes, coasts, and oceans around the world, and contributed to a special edition of Ambio on marine eutrophication discussing its international significance.

Nixon published fewer papers in the 1990s, but published one of his most significant in 1995 defining the growing international problem of coastal eutrophication. This paper clearly identified and separated the causes of coastal eutrophication from its indicators. Citation for Scientific Excellence from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, 2013