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Nick Meier, a farmer in La Porte City, has received grant support in converting 5 acres to wetlands, and has installed a denitrifying bioreactor and cover crops.

Meier seems delighted with his denitrifying bioreactor, as the gizmo is called: It functions properly, it robs him of very little cultivatable space, and it was funded by a state environmental program.

They also are developing water quality strategies that call for installing tens of thousands of denitrifying bioreactors to help reach those targets.

In anammox bacteria, there is a giant vacuole, or bag, called an annamoxosome where the denitrifying reactions — i.e., eating and breathing for the bacterium — transpire.

In the eastern tropical South Pacific, N:P is low because denitrifying bacteria remove nitrogen without also removing phosphorus.