Introduction to the ecological issues section

摘要

Despite the amount of research demonstrating that air quality can have a decisive impact on the health of organisms, including both plants and animals, air quality monitoring in many areas remains limited. There is no systematic monitoring of pollutants such as HNO_3, PAN, NH_y; NO_x is occasionally not included in routine monitoring programs (Davison and Cape, in this section). In some regions, air quality monitoring has been so focussed on human health, in urban and suburban areas, that potentially dangerous concentrations of pollutants in rural areas have not been identified. A major problem facing impacts research is the difficulty of predicting ecosystem-level responses from short-term studies of young trees grown under controlled conditions (Karnosky, in this section). More realistic studies are needed, such as FACE experiments (Karnosky et al., 2001) and studies around natural CO_2 sources (Tognetti et al., 2000). The complex nature of pollution and its interactions means that new methods of research are needed (Kohut, in this section). Kohut suggests that carbon dioxide gradients, model plant systems, molecular markers, and DNA microarray technology all have potential. We need to add to this list interdisciplinary investigations that compare near-pristine and heavily impacted ecosystems, in which analytical methods normally restricted to the laboratory are brought into use.