A study of anthropogenic and climatic disturbance of the New River Estuary using a Bayesian belief network

•A Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) was developed to model eutrophication in an estuary.•The BBN nodes were discretized exploring a new approach, the moment matching method.•Future climatic and nutrient pollution management scenarios were investigated.•The synergy among predictors of water quality cautions future management actions. The present paper utilizes a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) approach to intuitively present and quantify our current understanding of the complex physical, chemical, and biological processes that lead to eutrophication in an estuarine ecosystem (New River Estuary, North Carolina, USA). The model is further used to explore the effects of plausible future climatic and nutrient pollution management scenarios on water quality indicators. The BBN, through visualizing the structure of the network, facilitates knowledge communication with managers/stakeholders who might not be experts in the underlying scientific disciplines. Moreover, the developed structure of the BBN is transferable to other comparable estuaries. The BBN nodes are discretized exploring a new approach called moment matching method. The conditional probability tables of the variables are driven by a large dataset (four years). Our results show interaction among various predictors and their impact on water quality indicators. The synergistic effects caution future management actions.