From acid rain to global warming: Adirondack research faces funding crunch

Long-term environmental monitoring reveals climate change’s impact in the Adirondacks, but funding can be competitive

By Chloe Bennett

At least once a week, 30-year-old LJ Mills loads up a backpack with water sampling bottles, a laptop and wilderness supplies to take into the vast backcountry of the central Adirondacks. 

The biogeochemical research support specialist isn’t planning a leisurely few hours in the woods, but an exploratory workday with precise data collection and observation. He heads out of his ranch-style rental on the southern side of the 15,000-acre Huntington Wildlife Forest, a property owned by his employer, the State University of New York’s Environmental Science and Forestry College (SUNY-ESF) to visit several sites in the area.

Mills, and others, have been checking on the forest for nearly 50 years. The Adirondack Environmental Long-Term Monitoring Program (ADK-LTM) began in the 1970s to study acid rain. 

Now, the information-rich project is collecting vitals on the northern forest as the Earth experiences record-breaking temperatures. It’s one of many years-long monitoring projects in the park. 

“Long-term monitoring is probably the best body of evidence that we have to detect climate change in the future,” Mills said. “Without all this baseline data, it’s going to be basically impossible to tell what’s changing and how much it’s changing.”

Extended monitoring involves observations of the same natural system over many years. Professional and citizen scientists commit extensive amounts of time to the practice around the park. Some of the programs seek specific answers to research questions, such as changes in local flora, while others track patterns such as ice-in and ice-out dates. 

In the age of accelerated climate change caused by humans, long-term study serves as an encyclopedia of natural history that can be referenced for projects aimed at alleviating the effects of global warming. Policymakers, for example, need the historical information to inform decisions made for the future, scientists say. 

The success of protracted monitoring is found in the science and policy that shaped recovery from acid rain in the park, Colin Beier, associate professor at SUNY-ESF, said. Several long-term projects, including ADK-LTM and the Atmospheric Sciences Whiteface Field Station in Wilmington, contributed to a library of information on the issue. In 1990, Congress passed the Clean Air Act amendment focused on pollution that caused acid rain. 

“What we’ve seen is dramatic decreases in the pollution that causes acid rain and it’s not 100% attributable to the policy, but a lot of it is,” Beier said. “It’s a very successful example of what we can do with good science and forming policy.”

Data collection for projects like the effects of acid rain are transferable to other study areas, including the impact of warming on the park. Adirondack scientists say uninterrupted, prolonged monitoring and research are essential to forming climate resilience and adaptation, but money for the work is hard to come by. 

Far-off results and little funding

The effects of climate change are already present in the park, but it’s unclear how the next few hundred years will shape land, water and animals. 

Warmer winters are causing the early arrival of insects and downpours are breaking precipitation records. Research suggests the patterns may worsen. Recording those events with monitoring tools creates a measurement for extreme weather and other changes. Yet, funding proposals for projects without an immediate result are often turned down, researchers say. 

“We get rejected all the time when we ask for funding, it’s part of the scientific enterprise,” Stacy McNulty, associate director of research at SUNY-ESF, said. “It’s competitive, there’s only so much money out there.”

North of Huntington Wildlife Forest in Newcomb, Paul Smith’s College’s Adirondack Watershed Institute adds information on local waters to historical records going back to 1903. The Mirror Lake ice record keeps track of ice-in and ice-out dates that can be linked to changing temperatures. 

“The people that started keeping those records probably had no thought in their mind that they were creating this invaluable record about climate change in the Adirondacks,” Brendan Wiltse, chief scientist at AWI, said. 

Another monitoring program steered by AWI has operated for several decades, boasting the longest record of water quality research in the region. Wiltse and the rest of the organization took control of the Adirondack Long-Term Lake Monitoring Program project in early 2023. The project began in 1982 with sampling 17 lakes. It has since expanded to 58 lakes in the region. 

But its continuation is in danger with major funding cuts from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Starting in September, the EPA will no longer support the program financially, leading the team to search for other sources. The cut is part of the department’s broader movement away from acid deposition studies to prioritize climate change. 

“But the data has value outside of that and so it’s easy for funding to get sort of moved around, shifted or even lost because of the specific purpose for which that program began,” Wiltse said. 

Changing political winds

The organization received $100,000 from the state budget for its research and on-site lab, about half of what it requested.

“One of the frustrating things for me as a scientist is the amount of time that I have to spend trying to find money to keep these projects going, versus just doing the science and doing the monitoring that is coming out of these projects,” he said. 

Fear of the reallocation or loss of research funds can stem from changes in leadership across institutions and legislatures. Cycles and timing of the money are often tied to politics, McNulty said. 

“In the U.S., you have the federal budget and state budgets that are happening on an annual level,” she said. “That amount of money can change wildly from year to year, depending on what the priorities are.”

Money spent on ecological research is generally less than projects supporting health and medical studies, data show. The National Institute of Health, which disburses funds to biomedical and human health projects, had a budget nearing $48 billion in 2023. Its non-medical equivalent, the National Science Foundation, was allocated less than $10 billion the same year. 

“I think the funding that’s related to climate research, especially anything that’s field-based, the funding that we do, is pretty small,” Beier said. But attention and money for the subject has grown in recent years, he said. 

Money for the long-term projects in Newcomb comes from an unlikely source: the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) environmental research program. Its support began more than a decade ago. A current contract from 2023-27 between the parties totals $816,109, according to Beier. A previous agreement amounted to $612,900. 

“They recognized early on that for us to understand how the Adirondack system is reacting to pollution and changes in watersheds, that’s not a short-term, couple of years study, you have to look at that over a long, long time,” McNulty said.

The state agency also contributes to AWI’s long-term lake monitoring, with a contract that continues to December 2027. Funding long-term monitoring in the park’s watersheds helps inform energy-related decisions, NYSERDA said in an email. The research program is also invested in discovering human health impacts from climate change. 

Community science

The Adirondacks may seem rich in long-term monitoring programs, but Wiltse said more work of its kind should be done to address climate resilience. The number of programs “might be a little lacking relative to the size of our geography and the really unique and important role that the park plays in these issues,” he said. 

Still, many programs flourish with the power of volunteers and scientists. Vermont Center for Ecostudies’ Mountain Birdwatch program tracks certain bird populations across high elevations in the Northeast, with many observation routes in the Adirondacks. Jason Hill, a quantitative ecologist at the center, said although he submits grant proposals for the project several times a year, he rarely secures the money due to the competitive nature of research funding. 

The project began in 2000 and is primarily driven by volunteers’ information gathering atop Northeastern mountains. This year, Hill’s analysis of the past and present showed warming temperatures are likely driving many species upslope. He said the data is vital to understanding the future of the planet.

“Nature doesn’t occur on an alarm clock schedule,” Hill said. “It’s only when you collect the same kind of data systematically for years that you can start to see patterns.”

The 25-year-old Adirondack Lake Assessment Program, run by AWI, also relies on willing participants. The project has a funding gap, Wiltse said, that dollars from the state budget could close.

“That will just make sure that these programs that have been going on for decades now are more sustainable and can continue into the future,” he said. 

In Newcomb, much of the data collected by sensors and other monitoring systems at the Huntington Wildlife Forest are available to the public through a website with live information. 

Standing beside a wooden monitoring station above an inlet of the Arbutus Lake Watershed, site caretaker Mills said he hopes that public access will help people understand how climate change affects them. Flooding in summer 2023, for example, was recorded by the sensors and shows an outlier among decades of data. Now, Mills said, researchers need to translate that information to the average person who may not be familiar with climate science and ecosystem research. 

“I think that we can take that science and package it up in a way that everyone can digest,” he said. “It will be a lot more approachable for us to move forward as a society.”

Photo at top: AWI’s Upper Saranac Lake Environmental Monitoring Platform collects data for long-term projects. Photo by Brendan Wiltse