Air
Clean air is essential for life on earth, and air pollution is a serious threat to the health of both humans and the environment, including forests.
Forests are important to humans because they provide critical ecosystem services like timber, water, recreation, biodiversity, and more. Sustaining healthy forests requires an understanding of how air pollution harms these ecosystems and how pollution can be measured, reduced, or prevented.
The Forest Service invests in research to understand these relationships because:
- Air pollution can impair visibility, harm human health, injure trees and other plants, acidify or cause unnatural fertilization of streams and lakes, leach nutrients from soils, and degrade cultural resources like archeological sites and historical buildings.
- Forest activities – such as prescribed burning, energy development, and mining – can affect air quality. The Forest Service is committed to ensuring that its activities comply with air regulations for human health and monitoring possible impacts to natural resources.
- Forests can filter and clean air pollution, supplying breathable air for our planet. This is particularly significant in urban areas where airborne particles from industrial activities, motor vehicles, and power sources are most dense. Understanding how urban trees improve quality of life can help municipalities better plan and promote expanding green infrastructure.
Featured Work
i-Tree allows users to explore benefits provided by trees, such as the removal of air pollution and atmospheric carbon dioxide, stormwater reduction, temperature modification, and more.
N-CLAS helps resource managers and policy makers assess risks to forest ecosystems by calculating critical loads and exceedances of nitrogen deposition to forests in the northeastern U.S.
The Critical Loads Mapper is an interactive mapping tool that provides data and information on the resource effects of atmospheric nitrogen and sulfur deposition. This tool is a joint product of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, USDA Forest Service, and the National Park Service.
The Rocky Mountain Research Station Fire, Fuels, and Smoke Science Program conducts fundamental and applied research relating to wildland fire processes, terrestrial and atmospheric effects of fire, and ecological adaptations to fire.
The Pacific Northwest Research Station AirFire team develops tools to determine air quality impacts from wildfire and manage smoke from prescribed fire. These tools and other products support the Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program in meeting its Dingell Act mission of providing smoke outlooks for the public for large wildfires.
The Center for Forest Disturbance Science of the Southern Research Station conducts research to better understand the role of fire as an ecosystem process in a changing environment. The center also explores how this process can be manipulated through prescribed fire to maintain healthy and resilient forest ecosystems.
A cooperative effort between many different groups, the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP) monitors precipitation chemistry and studies its effects on the environment. Modeled information on atmospheric deposition and the sensitivities of ecosystem components to deposition is available from NADP science committees.
Portland Moss Research: Forest Service scientists used moss collected from urban trees to develop fine-scale maps of air pollution in Portland, Oregon. They identified two hotspots of cadmium pollution near stained-glass manufacturers in Portland, who voluntarily stopped using cadmium after the monitoring results were made public.
Forest Service labs – including the Southern Research Station Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, RMRS Fort Collins Forestry Sciences Laboratory, and NRS Grand Rapids Forestry Sciences Laboratory – help monitor forest conditions by analyzing vegetation and surface water samples for air pollution impacts.