The legacy from the 50 years of acid rain research, forming present and future research and monitoring of ecosystem impact: This article belongs to Ambio’s 50th Anniversary Collection. Theme: Acidification

Acid rain and acidification research are indeed a multidisciplinary field. This field evolved from the first attempts to mitigate acid freshwater in the 1920s, then linking acid rain to the acidification in late 1950s, to the broad project-concepts on cause and effect from the late 1960s. Three papers from 1974, 1976 and 1988 demonstrate a broad approach and comprise scientific areas from analytical chemistry, biochemistry, limnology, ecology, physiology and genetics. Few, if any, environmental problems have led to a public awareness, political decisions and binding limitations as the story of acid rain. Acid precipitation and acidification problems still exist, but at a lower pressure, and liming has been reduced accordingly. However, the biological responses in the process of recovery are slow and delayed. The need for basic science, multidisciplinary studies, long time series of high-quality data, is a legacy from the acid rain era, and must form the platform for all future environmental projects.