Comment on How Front Range cow waste and car exhaust are hurting Rocky Mountain National Park’s ecosystem

How Front Range cow waste and car exhaust are hurting Rocky Mountain National Park’s ecosystem

For decades, gases from car exhaust and cow waste have drifted from Colorado’s Front Range to harm plants, fish and wildlife in Rocky Mountain National Park, and while a decades-long effort to slow the damage is working, it’s not moving as quickly as environmentalists hoped. Nitrogen and ammonia, largely generated by heavy traffic along the Front Range and by agriculture in Larimer and Weld counties, are carried by air currents to the highest elevations of the treasured national park and deposited by rain and snow onto sensitive alpine tundra, where thin soil and delicate plants struggle to buffer the pollution. If the contamination worsens, wildflowers could disappear and algae could bloom in alpine lakes, changing the waters’ look and endangering fish, scientists told The Denver Post. “This issue gets worse as you go up in elevation as the sensitivity gets higher,” Jim Cheatham, an environmental protection specialist with the National Park Service’s air resource division, said during a recent meeting with Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission. Over time, the excess nitrogen — largely from vehicle exhaust — acts as a fertilizer to plants and changes the ecosystem, said Jill Baron, a research ecologist for the U.S.

 

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