ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT Our Environmental Assessment Projects focus on a wide range of topics, including various aspects of air, water, and soil pollution throughout the United States. E&S staff conducted an analysis of net greenhouse gas emissions associated with forest, agricultural, and wetland systems of New York State. Results will be used by NYSERDA and other …

E&S scientist Timothy Sullivan worked with scientists from the State University of New York and U.S. Geological Survey to measure how the chronic acidification of forests, lakes, and streams has affected the potential economic and cultural benefits they provide to society.

This research represents a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional effort to extrapolate research, monitoring, and modeling results, including physical, chemical, and biological findings from intensively-studied lakes to the regional population of acid-sensitive Adirondack lakes.

E&S Environmental Chemistry is collaborating with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Forest Service to assess the effects of acidic deposition on the current growth, health, and regeneration of sugar maple trees, and to determine the extent to which sugar maple response is associated with soil conditions in small upland watersheds within the Oswegatchie and Black river basins of the southwestern Adirondack Mountains in New York.

Most efforts to quantify aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem damage from sulfur (S) and nitrogen (N) air pollution in the Adirondack Mountains and to examine more recent ecosystem recovery in response to emissions control have focused on lakewater chemistry.