Combining Long-Term Watershed Monitoring at Buck Creek with Spatially Extensive Ecosystem Data to Understand the Processes of Acid Rain Effects and Recovery

Abstract:

The Buck Creek Monitoring Watershed, in the western Adirondack Region of New York, has provided long-term data back to 1982 for tracking acid rain effects and recovery, and for supporting fundamental research on environmental change. At Buck Creek, monitoring acidic deposition effects as they worsened, then diminished, has advanced our understanding of key biogeochemical processes such as Al mobilization. Although Al mobilization has been one of the primary adverse effects of acidic deposition, in the recovery phase it is now affecting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in new ways that could be both positive and negative, as soils and surface waters respond to further declines in acidic deposition.   Using stream Al measurements from Buck Creek over varying seasons and flows, a new index, the base cation surplus (BCS), was developed to account for dissolved organic carbon (DOC) effects on the relationship between ANC and inorganic Al. Mobilization of inorganic Al, the form toxic to biota, occurs below a BCS of zero, regardless of DOC concentrations. Soil and stream data from Adirondack surveys showed that a BCS value of zero corresponds to a soil base saturation value in the B horizon of approximately 12%. Additional Adirondack survey work indicated that, where sugar maple stands grew in soils with base saturation values below 12%, seedling regeneration was nearly zero, suggesting a link between Al mobilization and impairment of tree regeneration. In recovering Adirondack lakes, the BCS was also used to show that increasing trends in DOC were accelerating decreases of inorganic Al beyond what would be expected from the increasing trends of ANC. Similar decreases of inorganic Al in Buck Creek, were coupled with increases in organic Al concentrations, which resulted in no trend in total Al concentrations despite a strong increase in pH. Sampling of Buck Creek soils in 1997, and again in 2009-2010, indicated a substantial decrease in forest floor exchangeable Al, of which approximately 85% was accounted for by stream export through leaching of exchangeable Al from soil to stream.  Changes in the chemistry of the upper B horizon also suggest the possibility that recovery from acidification is accelerating podzolization in these soils.