Ecosystem Recovery from Acid Rain: Biogeochemical Consequences in the Soil-Stream Continuum

Thursday, May 2, 2019 2:30 pm - 2:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

As part of the Water Institute's seminar series Richard Marinos, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo, will present "Ecosystem Recovery from Acid Rain: Biogeochemical Consequences in the Soil-Stream Continuum."

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The substantial reductions of acid rain across the developed world are one of the great success stories of environmental regulation. Reduced acid deposition has had many positive effects on flora and fauna, but recent work also shows that reduced acid deposition can cause substantial losses of soil organic matter in temperate forests. In this talk, I will explore the mechanisms that underlie these losses of soil organic matter and the consequences that these changes in the soil have for downstream aquatic ecosystems. My work shows that, as forests recover from acid rain, changes to vegetation and soil geochemical properties promote the dissolution and respiration of soil organic matter, leading to greatly enhanced watershed nitrogen and carbon export. This raises the troubling hypothesis that, as forests recover further from acid rain, forests may become increasing sources of carbon to the atmosphere and of nitrogen to downstream ecosystems.

About the speaker

Richard Marinos

Richard Marinos is a biogeochemist who works to bridge the divide between terrestrial and aquatic sciences. He performed his dissertation research, studying how forests recover from acid rain, at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, the same forests where the negative effects of acid rain were first discovered. He completed his dissertation in 2018 at Duke University (North Carolina, USA) under Emily Bernhardt. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Water Institue member Nandita Basu's lab at the University of Waterloo, where he examines landscape-level controls on nutrient export in agricultural ecosystems.