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associated unequivocally with one pollutant, given that several pollutants are commonly
present.
The NRC's Committee on Biologic Markers of Air-Pollution Damage in Trees was
convened by the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the Commission on Life
Sciences at the request of the EPA. This committee was asked to conduct a workshop to
review, summarize, and evaluate current and potential uses of a broad range of biologic
markers of stress and damage in trees and forests that might be caused by air pollutants.
In a related effort, the NRC,s Committee on Biologic Markers has been examining the use
of markers in environmental (human) health research. That committee has defined
biologic markers as "indicators of variation in cellular or biochemical components or
processes, structure, or function that are measurable in biologic systems or samples"
(NRC, 1989) and is considering biologic markers of exposure, effect, and suscep-
tibility. A marker of effect is defined as "a measurable biochemical, physiologic, or
other alteration within an organism that, depending on magnitude, can be recognized as
an established or potential health impairment or disease.
This committee has used similar definitions. However, to deal with forests and
trees, it concentrated on biologic markers of effect and considered all measurable
variations in structure or function to be potential markers. Stresses can often cause
effects for which trees have compensatory mechanisms that prevent measurable damage or
dysfunction; the term "effects," as used in this publication, is intended to include
measurable compensatory responses as well as damage.
USING MARKERS IN COMBINATION
The application of biologic markers of air-pollution effects in forests reflects
two related objectives: documenting that changes have occurred in natural systems
exposed to high levels of stress and demonstrating under controlled conditions that a
given pollutant dose can elicit a measurable response in some specific biologic or
chemical process. The ultimate aim of developing markers is to integrate the two
objectives to provide a set of markers that will point toward primary mechanisms and
likely consequences of stress.
Biologic markers can be used in forests at several organizational levels,
including watersheds, forest stancis, individual trees, and metabolic processes. The
workshop emphasized responses that indicate dysfunctions in single trees and at lower
organizational levels, but useful indicators of ecosystem dysfunction were also
reviewed. Such indicators include chemical attributes of soils and streams, hydrologic
budgets (including evapotranspiration and water yield), and nutrient budgets (based on
fluxes and pool sizes) that describe the net movement of water and nutrients through
forest ecosystems. For example, despite the difficulties of documenting the specific
process alterations and assigning them to specific causes, the integration of system
function reflected in stream chemistry could turn out to provide a useful index of
cumulative effects of some air pollutants on forest systems (see D.W. Johnson et al. in
Part II).
Time--a fundamental variable--often is inadequately addressed. Biologic
processes are strongly influenced by daily and seasonal cycles and by changes in
surrounding plant communities that take place annually or over longer periods. The
consideration of time is particularly important in selecting markers to evaluate forest
responses to chronic low-level pollution, which can take months or years to be
expressed. For example, a change in net photosynthesis might be a useful marker of
short-term high-concentration exposure to pollutant gases, but be less useful than a
change in carbohydrate storage reserves or loss of membrane integrity as a marker of
Representative terms from entire chapter:
organizational levels
