Appalachian Trail an environmental lab

[cal04]

The Appalachian Trail gives hikers a nearly 2,200-mile trek through mountains, meadows and forests stretching from Georgia to Maine. But to scientists and land managers it's also a living laboratory that could provide warnings of looming environmental problems while there's still time to fix them.

A diverse group of organizations has launched a project to begin long-term monitoring of the trail's environmental health, with plans to tap into an army of volunteer "citizen scientists" and their professional counterparts.

Together, they will collect information about the health of plants, air and water quality, and animal migration patterns to build an early warning system for the 120 million people along the Eastern Seaboard.

(snip)
"We're really after two things," says Brian Mitchell, a coordinator with the park service's Northeast Temperate Network in Woodstock, Vt. "We want to get a better understanding of what's happening on the trail so we can better manage it. The other side is we want to take the lessons we learn from the trail and show people that what's happening on the trail does actually affect us."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061125/ap_on_re_us/appalachian_trail

[pooja]

1. Everytime man manages, the f...k it up.

[demnan]

2. There's no early warning left

With the vast amounts of trees along the Blue Ridge that have suffered from disease over the past 15 years, to the infringement of outer suburbs of cities such as Atlanta, Washington, D.C., etc., this entire area (I know only of the Southern Appalachians) is in ecological danger. I just drove through it a few weeks ago from Georgia through North Carolina into Eastern Tennessee and all up the Great Valley of Virginia and was shocked to see, from the severe drought, that many of the leaves had fallen early. Years back I noticed in Shenandoah National Park that many of the trees had a blight on them. These changes may perhaps have been fueled by global warming.

The housing market has also pushed the Washington, D.C. suburbs as far west now as Martinsburg, W.V. and southwest to Warrenton, VA and beyond. The impact of this growing population is pushing the wildlife both east (into older suburbs) and west (toward the mountain areas).

Acid rain from coal burning plants like those in the D.C. area and the Midwest is also participating in the degregation of this area and has for many years.

[pinto]

3. A great first hand account of the trail: "My Own Hike" by Nancy Shephard n/t

[Dead_Parrot]

4. "like the canary in the coal mine"

Oh goody, another canary.

I thought the idea of having a canary in the coal mine was, that when the canary dropped off it's perch you knew there was a problem.

It seems that these days when the canary drops off it's perch, you go looking for another canary. The frogs are dying, the glaciers are melting, the reefs are disappearing, Inuit houses are sliding into the mud and huge swathes of forest and farmland are drying out. Obviously what we need is another canary to use "as a barometer for environmental and human health conditions". Maybe this one will be a bit hardier than the others, so we can continue to sit around in pit full of a rather dangerous gas.