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THE IMPORTANCE OF CONCURRENT MONITORING AND MODELING FOR UNDERSTANDING MERCURY EXPOSURE IN THE ENVIRONMENT
Citation:
KNIGHTES, C. D. THE IMPORTANCE OF CONCURRENT MONITORING AND MODELING FOR UNDERSTANDING MERCURY EXPOSURE IN THE ENVIRONMENT. Presented at National Water Quality Monitoring Conference, Atlantic City, NJ, May 18 - 22, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
This research will provide the scientific information and technical data needed to reduce uncertainties limiting the Agency’s ability to assess and manage mercury and methylmercury risks.
Description:
Understanding the cycling processes governing mercury exposure in the environment requires sufficient process-based modeling and monitoring data. Monitoring provides ambient concentration data for specific sample times and locations. Modeling provides a tool for investigating the processes governing mercury exposure, providing insight into predictions of pasts and futures, and wildlife and human exposure risks. Both monitoring and modeling provide valuable information on their own, and one can be tempted to focus solely on one or the other. However, neither of these can be effectively used in isolation to address the mercury problem. By designing sampling strategies for monitoring concurrently with developing a site-specific modeling structure, a more complete picture of mercury exposure can be drawn connecting data temporally and spatially and anchoring modeling results. The difficulty lies when monitoring is done first and then modeling is attempted after the fact. In this presentation the case is made for combining modeling with monitoring at the onset of an ecosystem investigation by demonstrating benefits associated with more tightly coupled monitoring and modeling programs.