National Capital Region Network - Monitoring Air and Climate

The NCRN I&M Program is monitoring a suite of air quality vital signs including atmospheric deposition of nitrogen, sulfur, and mercury, ozone, and visibility. Fortunately a number of state and federal agencies have already established a network of air resources monitoring sites in and around the National Capital Region. The NCRN is utilizing these resources along with assitance from the NPS Air Resources Division to monitor the air quality in and around parks in the National Capital Region Network.

Climate Change Monitoring

The NCRN I&M program is currently conducting a long-term project to monitor the regional effects of climate change through measurements of tidal marsh elevation. The possibility of rising sea levels threatens to submerge these unique marshes whose presence in our region is already limited by development and urbanization. This monitoring is being done in conjunction with the Northeast Coastal and Barrier and the Northeast Temperate I&M networks and with select U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) refuges. Parallel protocols are being used by all parties so that data can eventually be compiled to assess trends for the entire North Atlantic region. A project workplan is available at http://nrinfo.nps.gov/Reference.mvc/Profile?code=2166645.

This collaboration of I&M networks and FWS refuges fits neatly into the nascent effort that both NPS and FWS are involved in, to create Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) that address climate change on a large scale. To learn more about LCCs visit http://www.fws.gov/science/shc/lcc.html.