9416005 Aber The forested and agricultural landscapes of New England and Europe share a common history of long-term human land use and more recent increases in anthropogenic atmospheric deposition. The commonality of interests between New England and Ireland are especially apparent. Both are regions adjacent to areas of high air pollution emissions which experience variable and episodic pollution deposition events. Both are humid regions initially covered mainly with deciduous broad-leaved forests. Both have experienced near-complete deforestation for conversion to both row-crop agriculture and grazing. A Critical difference between the two is that much of New England has become reforested through farm abandonment over the last 150 years, while the Irish landscape is still dominated by agricultural use. However, recent experience demonstrating that Ireland's mild climate can support the most rapid rates of forest growth in Europe has lead to an aggressive program of reforestation, mainly with conifers native to the northwestern U.S. Impacts of reforestation on landscape esthetics, land use patterns and water quality have all been questioned. Specifically, this project is designed 1) to combine existing biogeochemical data sets from the European EXMAN (EXperimental MANipulation of forest ecosystems) network with similar data set for the northeastern U.S., 2) to develop a 1 km resolution GIS for Ireland containing information on monthly average maximum and minimum temperature, monthly precipitation, monthly solar radiation and on the distribution of major soils types in order to predict potential forest productivity for Ireland using the PnET model, and to compare these results with those from a similar analysis for New England, and 3) to examine the long-term effects of land use on soil properties and function by comparing adjacent field and forest systems, adjacent forest systems with different land use histories, and forest sites with different vegetation types.
