nutrientuse

Nutrientuse, sometimes written as nutrient-use, is a concept in biology and ecology that describes how efficiently a system uses available nutrients to support growth, maintenance, and reproduction.

The term covers the sequence from nutrient uptake to internal processing, allocation within tissues, and eventual loss or recycling. It is distinct from nutrient uptake alone, which only measures absorption from the environment.

Key components include uptake efficiency (the share of available nutrients absorbed), assimilation efficiency (the portion incorporated into biomass), allocation efficiency (how nutrients are distributed among tissues), and retention or recycling through turnover.

Measurements of nutrientuse vary by system. In plants, nutrient-use efficiency (NUE) is often biomass produced per unit nutrient absorbed or per unit available in soil. In microbes and animals, analogous metrics relate growth to incorporated nutrients.

Applications include optimizing fertilizer use to improve crop NUE, modeling nutrient cycling in ecosystems, and evaluating dietary or algal culture strategies in food and bioenergy contexts.

Limitations include context dependence, species differences, and trade-offs between rapid growth and nutrient conservation. Related concepts include ecological stoichiometry and nutrient-use efficiency in plants. See also: nutrient cycling, Liebig's law of the minimum.

In some literature the term nutrientuse is used without a hyphen.