Another environmental scare debunked: New study shows acid rain doesn’t kill trees — actually, trees grow more with acid rain! – Published in journal Forest Ecology & Management
By Marc Morano
July 18, 2024
8:00 am
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112723008782Forest Ecology and Management
Volume 553, 1 February 2024, 121644
Excerpts:
We would emphasize three highlights from this long-term experiment for application to management of forest. The first is the most general: this forest was very dynamic over time, responding strongly and non-uniformly to the shifting N biogeochemistry. The growth of a forest may not be tightly predetermined by inherent site characteristics, when these characteristics (such as climate, biogeochemistry, and management inputs) are themselves not constant and subject to change. Broad average trends might be expected, along with substantial variation around such trends. The second highlight is that forest science by definition occurs at the frontier of current knowledge. Questions are developed that have no current answer and knowledge is developed by proposing new ideas and challenging them with evidence. Concerns about the impacts of air pollution and N deposition in the 20th Century led to ideas about how forests might respond to high, chronic additions of N. These ideas were logically possible, but confidence would be limited until the ideas were challenged by evidence from research projects. Nitrogen biogeochemistry is fundamentally important in all forests, with major influences on species composition, growth, and potentially water quality in streams. Our project demonstrated that long-term questions of the impacts of increased N inputs could not be adequately explored with short-term applications of very large amounts of N (see also Leuzinger et al., 2011, Bebber, 2021). This points to the third highlight: long-term experiments are fundamental for understanding how real forests change across decades. We have excellent long-term records of forest growth from extensive, well-designed forests inventories for many parts of the world, but we have far too few long-term experiments that can challenge our ideas that try to explain forest patterns at the temporal and spatial scales that would provide a sound foundation for successful management. Indeed, we should not be complacent that our historically important long-term research will be sustained, as many have become “extinct” over the decades (e.g., Turner, 2023). Our abilities to understand, predict, and adapt to changing forests of the future will be determined in part by both sustained long-term experiments and how the forest science community engages with forest managers (see Binkley et al., 2018).
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