North America

Director

Alan Townsend

INSTAAR and Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

University of Colorado

Campus Box 450

Boulder, CO 80309-0450 USA

Phone: (303) 492-6865

Fax: (303) 492-6388

alan.townsend(at)colorado.edu

NANC Website

Up-to-date information on the North American Nitrogen Center can be viewed at their web site: ibl.colorado.edu/NANC.html

Overview

The North American Nitrogen Center grew out of the former International SCOPE Nitrogen Project (1993-2002) on regional-scale transport and transformations of fixed nitrogen, directed by John Freney of Australia and Bob Howarth of the USA.  The North American Center has the following goals:

• To better assess the sources of N pollution and the drivers of change in N cycling across the regions of North America, with an emphasis on evaluating trends in fluxes and environmental exposure.
• To comprehensively and quantitatively assess both the ecological and human-health consequences of N pollution in North America.
• To develop policy options for reducing N pollution and to encourage large-scale pilot studies to test potential policies and technical solutions.
• To communicate the issues of human acceleration of the N cycle to the public and to decision makers, and to facilitate communication and interaction among the scientific community.

The Center works as a consortium of interacting projects with many principal investigators and institutions, and multiple sources of funding. An oversight board assists with the development and implementation of the Center's program:

• Donald Boesch, Univ. of Maryland Center for Env. Sciences
• John Downing, Iowa State University
• Lynn Goldman, John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Bob Howarth, Cornell University
• Dennis Keeney, Inst. for Ag. & Trade Policy, Minneapolis
• Jerry Melillo, the Ecosystems Center, MBL, Woods Hole
• Knute Nadelhoffer, University of Michigan
• Phillip Robertson, Michigan State University
• Donald Scavia, Michigan SeaGrant Program
• David Schindler, University of Alberta
• Peter Vitousek, Stanford University