May 18th, 2010

Here’s one more reason to bemoan the spread of kudzu throughout the southeastern United States: When the ubiquitous “vine that ate the South” isn’t gobbling up landscapes and devastating ecosystems, it also is adding to ozone pollution, a new report says.

In the May 17 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researcher John Hickman and colleagues (who worked together at Stony Brook University) concluded that kudzu is able to fix atmospheric nitrogen at a high rate, potentially altering the nitrogen cycle. Hickman, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, compared nitrogen cycling and nitrogen oxide fluxes from both invaded and unaffected soils.

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