The U.S. Department of Energy is supporting research by SNRE Professor Don Zak that may help finally answer how human production of nitrogen are shaping forests and the future of Earth’s climate.
SNRE faculty Ming Xu and Don Zak are among the U-M editors working on a new online journal exploring issues of sustainability.
Research being led by SNRE Professor Don Zak has received an additional five years of federal support, enabling researchers to continue an unprecedented study of how changes in climate are affecting the DNA of forests. The new round of National Science Foundation funding allows work to continue through 2018. The experiments are taking place in northern Michigan, and examine how climate change is influencing the activity of soil microbes, which decay dead leaves and roots in a process that controls the amount of carbon stored in soils.
Scientists recently discovered nitrogen that falls from the atmosphere in acid rain can influence large tracts of sugar maples in North America. The atmospheric nitrogen in acid rain can affect forest ecosystems by acidifying soils and causing nutrient imbalances. Sugar maples in northeastern North America are especially vulnerable. Vast maple areas have been affected by this acidification process, which depletes soil calcium in already calcium-poor soils such as those of the Eastern United States.
North American forests appear to have a greater capacity to soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas than researchers had previously anticipated. As a result, they could help slow the pace of human-caused climate warming more than most scientists had thought, a U-M ecologist and his colleagues have concluded. The results of a 12-year study at an experimental forest in northeastern Wisconsin challenge several long-held assumptions about how future forests will respond to the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide blamed for human-caused climate change, said University of Michigan microbial ecologist Donald Zak, lead author of a paper published online this week in Ecology Letters.
Don Zak, a professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, will deliver the Francis Clark Distinguished Lectureship at the 2009 Soil Science Society of America meeting. The lectureship is the highest award given by the society for pioneering work in soil biology and biochemistry. His lecture will be delivered Nov. 3 at the International Annual Meetings of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA). That event is Nov. 1-5 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pa. It brings together more than 3,500 people from 50-plus countries representing academia, government and private industry, including a large contingent of undergraduate and graduate students.