Abstract
Concern regarding the impacts of continued nitrogen and sulfur deposition on ecosystem health has prompted the development of critical acid load assessments for forest soils. A critical acid load is a quantitative estimate of exposure to one or more pollutants at or above which harmful acidification-related effects on sensitive elements of the environment occur. A pollutant load in excess of a critical acid load is termed exceedance. This study combined a simple mass balance equation with national-scale databases to estimate critical acid load and exceedance for forest soils at a 1-km 2 spatial resolution across the conterminous US. This study estimated that about 15% of US forest soils are in exceedance of their critical acid load by more than 250 eq ha −1 yr −1, including much of New England and West Virginia. Very few areas of exceedance were predicted in the western US.
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