Environmental Monitoring Facility for the Black Rock Forest

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

9412997 Schuster, W. The Black Rock Forest Consortium, a group of fourteen New York-area academic institutions, will install environmental monitoring facility at its field station, the 1500 hectare Black Rock Forest. The Black Rock Forest is located in the Hudson Highlands, 80 km north of New York City, and possesses a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic habitats for study. It has carefully protected and managed for nearly a century, and has been utilized by the Black Rock Forest Consortium since 1989. The forest has become a focal point for scientific field studies and education for thousands of faculty and students from Consortium institutions. Despite many natural features that make it a logical location for scientific field work, the Black Rock Forest lacks a meteorological facility. An increasing trend in use of the station for biological and environmental science studies that created a need for such a facility. The facility will continuously record a range of important meteorological variables at two locations within the Forest, and will include precipitation sampling equipment. Data will be downloaded, and entered into a widely-available database, and equipment will be maintained on a regular, weekly basis by Black Rock Forest staff. The facility will be one component of a regional network of monitoring stations spanning 330 km along the Hudson River. The resulting data will significantly improve the quality of ongoing studies in plant ecology, aquatic ecology, dendrochronology, and biogeochemistry, and will stimulate the expansion of scientific and educational use of the Black Rock Forest.