April 30, 2002
Dr. Leland Tarnay receives DRI's Colin Warden Award
Dr. Leland Tarnay has received the Desert Research Institute’s $1,000 Colin Warden Memorial Endowment Award for his studies suggesting that western forests do not absorb atmospheric nitrogen from air pollution as rapidly as forests in wetter environments. Tarnay, a former DRI graduate research assistant who recently earned a Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Reno, conducted his research as part of a larger effort to understand how air pollutants contribute to the loss of Lake Tahoe’ famous water clarity.Tarnay exposed fir and pine seedlings to nitric acid vapor in a laboratory simulation of Lake Tahoe’s summertime conditions to observe how effectively the seedlings removed nitrogen, a significant nutrient cause of algal growth in lake water. His findings show that under arid summer a conditions, when nitrogen levels from auto emissions are at their highest, the absorption capacity of pine and fir trees is nearly a third lower than prevailing scientific models have predicted.
The full extent of what this means to the overall nitrogen budget of the Tahoe Basin isn’t clear,” said Tarnay, “but this indicates that prevailing predictive models developed in more humid environments may not accurately describe what is occurring in arid western forests.” He believes the distinctions between dry and humid conditions could also influence other factors that influence the levels of algal nutrients entering Lake Tahoe.
The $1,000 award is named for Colin Warden, a Washoe Medical Center electrician and an ardent environmentalist who died in 1991. His family and friends established the endowment to promote environmental research by graduate students working at DRI or supervised by DRI scientists.
A nonprofit, statewide division of the University and Community College System of Nevada, DRI pursues a full-time program of basic and applied environmental research on a local, national, and international scale. Nearly 400 full- and part-time scientists, technicians, and support staff conduct some 150 research projects at DRI annually. More than 80 percent of DRI's annual $33 million operating budget consists of research grants and contracts obtained by its scientists. The balance is received from the state of Nevada for administrative costs.
