| Dr.
Leland Tarnay Receives Colin Warden Award
Dr. Leland Tarnay has
received the Desert Research Institute’s 2001 Colin Warden
Memorial Endowment Award for his studies suggesting that western
forests do not absorb atmospheric nitrogen from air pollution as
rapidly as forests in wetter environments. Tarnay, a former DRI
graduate research assistant who recently earned a Ph.D. from the
University of Nevada, Reno, conducted his research as part of a
larger effort to understand how air pollutants contribute to the
loss of Lake Tahoe’s famous water clarity.
Tarnay exposed fir and
pine seedlings to nitric acid vapor in a laboratory simulation of
Lake Tahoe’s summertime conditions to observe how effectively
the seedlings removed nitrogen, a significant nutrient cause of
algal growth in lake water. His findings show that under arid summer
conditions, when nitrogen levels from auto emissions are at their
highest, the absorption capacity of pine and fir trees is nearly
a third lower than prevailing scientific models have predicted.
“The full extent
of what this means to the overall nitrogen budget of the Tahoe Basin
isn’t clear,” says Tarnay, “but this indicates
that prevailing predictive models developed in more humid environments
may not accurately describe what is occurring in arid western forests.”
He believes the distinctions between dry and humid conditions could
also influence other factors that affect the levels of algal nutrients
entering Lake Tahoe.
The $1,000 award is named
for Colin Warden, a Washoe Medical Center electrician and an ardent
environmentalist who died in 1991. His family and friends established
the endowment to promote environmental research by graduate students
working at DRI or supervised by DRI scientists.
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