UM scientist to lead air act evaluation

ORONO – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tapped a University of Maine scientist to lead a national evaluation of the 1990 Clean Air Act.

Steve Kahl of Old Town, director of the Sen. George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research at UMaine, will spend three months this year at an EPA research center in Corvallis, Ore., working on the project.

“Steve has a long-term involvement with EPA, including an extensive history of Clean Air Act related research,” says John Stoddard, director of EPA’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program, Surface Water Division.

“The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments require EPA to report to Congress in 2002 on the effectiveness of the act’s acid rain provisions. We have asked Steve to compile and analyze the latest information, including his own research, to evaluate the trends in surface waters relevant to future Clean Air Act legislation. In addition to the Maine data, much of the regional EPA data has come from his laboratory for the past decade,” Stoddard said.

Over the past 20 years, Kahl has conducted research with scientists from UMaine and other institutions on the environmental consequences of atmospheric deposition on lakes, streams and soils. He has focused attention on the Bear Brook watershed in eastern Hancock County and led the development of a

project to study nitrogen and mercury geochemistry at Acadia.

One of the signature programs of the Mitchell Center is PEARL, a Web-based, searchable environmental information resource.

“Maine has some of the longest records and largest data sets for lake and stream chemistry in the U.S., with the important advantage of the samples being collected and analyzed by the same laboratory for the entire period of the Clean Air Act,” said Kahl.

Kahl is on sabbatical from his UMaine post this year. He is also working with the National Park Service on plans for a new Research and Education Center under development at the former U.S. Navy facility at Winter Harbor. He continues research on acid rain and climate change in Maine, on small watershed chemistry at Acadia National Park and on two Internet database projects involving environmental chemistry and Web-based education.

Since the early 1980s, the Mitchell Center has been awarded more than $14 million for watershed research funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. EPA, and the USGS.

Kahl and Steve Norton, UMaine geologist, have a current grant of $860,000 from EPA to continue studying chemical trends in lakes and streams from Maine to the Adirondacks in New York. The grant encompasses most of the EPA’s acid rain national research program and includes funding for the Bear Brook experimental watershed research project.