Meanwhile, a decreasing trend in the riverine dissolved silicate (DSi) flux was observed in recent few decades in the Changjiang River basin ( Dai et al., 2011 ; Ma et al., 2018 ), which could have a drastically impact on the biodiversity of primary production in the Changjiang estuary under the background of increasing nitrogen and phosphorus fluxes ( Liu et al., 2013 ; Zhou et al., 2017 ; Xiao et al., 2018 ).
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The sentences
There was a clear trend in the monthly variation in freshwater discharge, and the annual discharge mainly fluctuated around approximately 258 km 3 /a and 268 km 3 /a over the sampling year at the inflow and outflow stations, respectively, in the TGR.
We observed an increasing trend of NO 3 loading in the TGR ( Table 3 ), which may have caused a shift in nutrient stoichiometry and enhanced eutrophication in the river and estuary ( Ran et al., 2018a ).