![]() “Some will recover on the order of decades. Forests are on a completely different timeline than lakes. They need a lot of calcium and the soils are depleted. Trees like sugar maple and red spruce are suffering the most. And one could argue that the impact is as bad as it was in 1990 when we passed the Clean Air Act amendments,” he says. So, even though today’s rain is far less acidic, sensitive forests are less able to deal with it. ![]() Years of acid rain falling on their soils has leached away calcium and other minerals that used to neutralize the acid. He says forests are having a much tougher time. “It’s just like everyone, 'Whew, that problem is solved, now we can think about something else,'” says Gene Likens, co-founder of the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies, and one of the first people to discover acid rain in the U.S. Many are now coming back to life, with fish and other fauna reviving. That’s mostly thanks to the 1990 Clean Air Act, which has made a big difference to lakes and streams. Since the bad old days of the 1970s and '80s, there has been a whole lot less acid falling on the Northeast. “What affects the forests, ultimately affects lakes and streams as well,” Roy says.įorests and lakes are connected, but how they recover from acid rain is very different. But first we have to hike through a forest. They were going to check how acidic the water is these days a process repeated in dozens of lakes monthly. When I visited, she and her team were heading to a pond near Lake Placid, New York. Roy now manages the Adirondack Long Term Monitoring program. ![]() “There were people talking about the record fish that were no longer found,” she says. The second was learning about dying lakes in the Northeast. The first was the decline of the forest on Camel’s Hump, a mountain in Vermont. Karen Roy was in grad school in the early 1980s when two things made her realize acid rain was a big deal.
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