Estimated damage due to road salt application was between $803 and $3,401 per ton applied resulting in annual costs of up to $75 billion in the USA.

In the 2017/18 winter season, nearly 22 million metric tons of road salt was applied for de-icing in the USA.

Salt removal from drinking water supplies requires installation of expensive desalination systems. Salt pollution causes damage to roadside vegetation, material goods, and infrastructure, including roads and bridges, as well as water systems. Snow accumulation data were obtained from the National Weather Service, and salt usage data from the U. The sliding window was chosen to minimize annual fluctuations which would otherwise mask the long-term trend. Trends of snow accumulation and salt usage for de-icing roadways.Īverage snow accumulation in Central Park, New York, and salt usage for de-icing for the USA are shown using a 20-year sliding window starting in the winter season of 1940/41. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.įig 1. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Raw sequence data have been deposited with links to BioProject accession number PRJNA522438 in the NCBI BioProject database ( ) and 16S partial sequences of the isolates in GenBank ( ) with the accession numbers MK543962 to MK543988, MK543991 to MK543994, and MK543996 to MK544007.įunding: The research was supported by private donations through the Haloarchaeal Education & Research Development (HERD) fund ( ) to SD. Received: FebruAccepted: AugPublished: September 4, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Pecher et al. PLoS ONE 14(9):Įditor: Christopher Staley, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, UNITED STATES (2019) Effects of road salt on microbial communities: Halophiles as biomarkers of road salt pollution. Citation: Pecher WT, Al Madadha ME, DasSarma P, Ekulona F, Schott EJ, Crowe K, et al.

Making gradients in gimp 2.8.22