Bird specimens track 135 years of atmospheric black carbon and environmental policy.

ABSTRACT: Atmospheric black carbon has long been recognized as a public health and environmental concern. More recently, black carbon has been identified as a major, ongoing contributor to anthropogenic climate change, thus making historical emission inventories of black carbon an essential tool for assessing past climate sensitivity and modeling future climate scenarios. Current estimates of black carbon emissions for the early industrial era have high uncertainty, however, because direct environmental sampling is sparse before the mid-1950s. Using photometric reflectance data of >1,300 bird specimens drawn from natural history collections, we track relative ambient concentrations of atmospheric black carbon between 1880 and 2015 within the US Manufacturing Belt, a region historically reliant on co

SUBMITTER: DuBay SG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5664526 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature