Boundary‐Crossing Field Research Marks the Way to Evidence‐Based Management of Mercury in Forest Landscapes

Abstract

The atmospheric deposition of long‐range atmospheric mercury pollution presents forest managers with a “wicked” problem—forestry operations run the risk of mobilizing this pollution legacy. Management of that risk would benefit from a process‐based understanding of how forest management influences the mercury cycle. This commentary highlights the value for building such an understanding of a comprehensive Before‐After‐Control‐Impact study reported by McCarter et al. (2022), https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JG006826 on the Marcel Experimental Forest in the north‐central continental US. That study looked at how different types of forest harvest influenced the movement of mercury through the landscape. The results of this study place it at the minimal end of the range of impacts on Hg mobilization resulting from forest harvest. What makes this paper, together with the companion papers resulting from this study, particularly valuable for improving the understanding of forestry influences on mercury is the number of system boundaries that the study crossed: between land and atmosphere, from a forested hillslope down into a wetland, and finally up into the biota on that wetland.

Challenges in studying water fluxes within the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum: A tracer-based perspective on pathways to progress

“…What one discipline considers a boundary condition might be the study object of other disciplines (e.g., Staudinger et al (2019); see Figure 1). Other researchers have already highlighted the need to investigate interfaces across which water is exchanged between system compartments, but this requires us to leave the conceptualization of simple system boundaries and enable crosscompartmental approaches (see commentary by Bishop and Eklöf (2022)). The different points of view from colleagues from neighbouring disciplines can help to solve via triangulation a common problem and help to better understand different processes and the scales at which they are relevant.…”