UMaine-Virginia Tech Pair Up to Receive Nearly $800,000 for Watershed Research
Contact: Kevin Simon (207) 581-2618; Aimee Dolloff, (207) 581-3777
ORONO, Maine – Three University of Maine professors, in collaboration with colleagues at Virginia Tech, recently received nearly $800,000 to study the impact that pollution from excess nitrogen is having on the environment.
“Nitrogen in general is a huge problem,” says Kevin Simon, UMaine assistant professor of stream ecology. “Human activity has more than doubled the amount of nitrogen on the landscape, creating a pollution problem and changing the balance among multiple nutrients that limit biological activity in ecosystems.”
Simon and UMaine Professors Ivan Fernandez and Stephen Norton have received $522,857 from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology to study the Bear Brook Watershed in Maine – a long-term experimental forested watershed in eastern Maine where research began in the mid-1980s as part of the national agenda of research to determine the effects of acid deposition on surface waters and their related watersheds.~
This current project builds on the Bear Brook program of research by examining the interactions among multiple elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, metals, and the process of ecosystem acidification. This is whole ecosystem research that studies the changes in chemicals and water as they travel from the atmosphere through the ecosystem, including the soils and eventually the streams draining the watershed.
Although nitrogen occurs in the environment naturally and is essential for plant growth, too much nitrogen from pollution can result in negative effects on forests, animals, such as fish and amphibians, and water quality.
Simon explains that the Bear Brook site is unique in that half of the site remains in a natural condition, while the other half is treated by helicopter with ammonium sulfate every other month for scientists to study the impact of the extra nitrogen and sulfur in the environment. Ammonium sulfate, commonly used as fertilizer and a byproduct given off by many power plants, reduces the pH of the soil and increases ecosystem nitrogen and sulfur similar to the effects of acid rain.
By combining a study of the Bear Brook Watershed with work being done under the NSF funding by researchers at Virginia Tech and the U.S. Forest Service at their research watershed, the U.S. Forest Service Fernow Experimental Forest in West Virginia, researchers will be able to test a wider range of nitrogen pollution.
“West Virginia gets a much higher loading of nitrogen deposition than Maine, so the comparison of the results from these two watersheds provides valuable insights into ecosystem response to air pollutants” says Simon.
Simon, Fernandez and Norton will be assisted in the project at UMaine by a post-doctoral fellow and graduate student. Professor Maury Valett at Virginia Tech and Dr. Mary Beth Adams of the U.S. Forest Service also will work with a graduate student on the project using their portion of the grant funding, $275,573.
“There’s an exciting educational component to our research,” says Simon.
Old Town High School teacher Ed Lindsey will expose some of his students to the science by collaborating in the research at the Maine and West Virginia field sites.
“It’s an opportunity they really don’t have unless it’s managed for them,” says Lindsey. He hopes the experience will show students what is available to them after high school by exposing them to a whole other world of educational opportunities in their backyard.
The project is expected to run for three years, and researchers will hold a series of workshops in which high school, undergraduate, and graduate students work with researchers and teachers to promote multidisciplinary learning. They also will develop a computer simulation model of the impacts of nitrogen deposition for use in high school and college science curricula. A website and direct interactions among researchers, high school students and teachers will be used to disseminate results to the public.
Once this portion of the study is completed, Simon says he hopes more funding will be made available to turn the educational computer simulation model into a computer modeling program that can be used to predict environmental impacts from nitrogen pollution.
In the meantime, the research team is working to expand the study to include colleagues from around the world and to study entire drainage networks.