In the article “Long-term changes in soil pH across major forest ecosystems in China” the researchers look at various samples and research some long term effects in the soils of the Chinese forests because of the heavy industrial pollution produced in the recent years. In order to do that they  examined temporal variations in topsoil pH and their relationships with atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition across China’s forests from the 1980s to the 2000s. To accomplish this goal, the researchers conducted artificial neural network simulations using historical data from the 1980s and a data set from literature published after 2000. The abstract further summarized their results, saying that there is a definite  negative correlation between atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition, further supporting the argument that there is a need for measures that reduce sulfur and nitrogen emissions so as to maintain ecosystem structure and function in forests and any other ecosystem that may be effected.

The purpose of this study was to better our understanding of the effect of acidic deposition on soil pH, especially in China’s. It is generally well known that the effect of acidic deposition on soil pH is not very good for most plants and the animals that relay on them.  The data used in this study was mostly historical and various reports on how what was emitted and where and then experiments on different soils from the soils all collected together and ran through a satirical analysis software to look for a correlation that came out to be quite strong and in support of their hypothesis that there was a lot of harmful sulfur and nitrogen polluting and damaging the ecosystems.

To gather the data the researchers had to use both detached observations and various records that had been put together in previous years. I think this was a fairly useful study and incredibly important when trying to prove that there is an environmental issue present to be addressed. The only issue is their data for the historical soils is somewhat old, but that is a fairly minor issue.

Yang, Y., Li, P., He, H., Zhao, X., Datta, A., Ma, W., Zhang, Y., Liu, X., Han, W., Wilson, M. C. and Fang, J. (2015), Long-term changes in soil pH across major forest ecosystems in China. Geophys. Res. Lett., 42: 933–940. doi: 10.1002/2014GL062575.