Nutrient pollution is one of the most widespread water quality problems facing the US, posing serious consequences to aquatic ecology and formidable challenges for watershed management. Scientific advances over the past several decades have refined our understanding of nutrient (nitrogen, phosphorus) processes and interactions in soil systems, the critical zone, landscapes, and watersheds. Advances have also been made toward understanding the effects of excess nutrients on freshwater environments including outbreaks of harmful algae and their associated cyanotoxins, along with impacts at higher trophic levels. More recently, innovations in models, measurements (e.g., via in-situ sensors and remotely-sensed data), and data integration/synthesis have been critical to understanding and quantifying both nutrient processes and effects. However, linking these innovations and “big data” to applied nutrient management has been challenging, and often the innovations remain in the basic science arena. This session offers reasons to be optimistic that scientists and managers are partnering to maximize the use of recent scientific innovations to solve the freshwater nutrient pollution problem. Our session features a suite of current scientific contributions that engage and link innovative studies of nutrient process and ecological effects to management opportunities and real-world implementation plans for reducing nutrient-related pollution in freshwater ecosystems. In addition, the session highlights different management approaches that take advantage of these recent scientific advances and that themselves display significant innovation. They include market-based strategies and working intensely with local stakeholders using “translational ecology” approaches. Most of the speakers will either focus on or include discussion of nutrient issues that involve the environs surrounding the meeting’s location in Louisville, Kentucky. Together, the collection of speakers in this session will address (1) recent advances to characterize the factors and processes that contribute to nutrient levels and their ecological effects in freshwater environments, (2) approaches for managing nutrients and their effects, especially at the watershed scale, and (3) prospects for ecological recovery once nutrient management approaches have been deployed.