The symptoms of air pollutants on injuries to broad-leaved forest trees

Wien

1971

zahlr. Lit. Ang.

Unselbständiges Werk

673

200144147

The impact of air pollution on forest tree plantings is of intense concern throughout the world. Many air-pollution problems can be resolved only by intematioial programs of cooperative research. Because of the apparent sensitivity of and more conspicuous injuries to conifer trees by air pollutants, little has been accomplished in delineating the symptonatology of hardwood trees. The most important tree pollutants are sulfur dioxide, fluoride, and ozone. Attempts to relate these aerial contaminants to effects on hardwood trees are hampered by deficiences in instrumentation and methods of atmospheric analyses, by inadequate knowledge about how various factors alter comparatively simple gaseous forms into phytotoxicants of indefinable composition, by the inability to distinguish air-pollution symptomatology from that caused by other causal agents, and by insufficient information about changes and interactions with which air pollutants are influenced by the total environment. Investigations are needed to characterize acute and chronic symptome caused by single and multiple pollutants and to relate pollution injury to the modifying conditions of environmetnal parameters upon forest hardwood trees. If our outlook remains unchanged toward curbing the harmful aspects of air pollution as our population spirals upwards, as demands for energy increase, and as more wastes are released into the atmosphere, we may experience injury and damage to forest trees of a nature and magnitude not yet imagined.