The complexity of environmental problems we face now and in the future is ever increasing. Process linkages among air, land, surface and subsurface water require interdisciplinary approaches. The dynamics of land use change spurred by population and economic growth, and the impact of Best Management Practices in urban and agricultural areas must be considered in environmental exposure and risk assessment. An abundance of related research and model development is proceeding in Universities, Federal agencies and research laboratories, being sponsored by industry-based research foundations. EPA is interested in fostering a community approach to multidisciplinary ecosystem modeling and analysis. The emerging problems are larger than one group or one agency can expect to solve. Thus, the primary goal of this workshop is to bring together stakeholders from many of these diverse groups to work together toward open architecture problem solving environments that facilitate the integration of state-of-the-science process models/modules, application domain specification and data preparation, and decision support. A flexible problem solving environment will enable exploration of a variety of modeling approaches dealing with multiple scale and stressor interaction. Object technology, new computing algorithms and architectures, and intelligent data analysis offer promise for overcoming previous computing limitations and modeling inflexibility. In the workshop, investigators from the 1996 EPA STAR grants for High Performance Computing and Communications and 1999 EPA STAR grants for Computing technology for Ecosystem Modeling will be presenting the results of their research efforts. The anticipated outcome of the workshop are better understanding of cross-media exchange processes and scale issue, variety of framework approaches for dealing with cross-discipline model integration and application issues and identification of inter-disciplinary opportunities for collaboration.

August 2000.

Office of Water Water Quality Modeling Program: BASINS -- EPA Regional Perspective -- Near Laboratory ecological research area studies in the Neuse River -- Water quality issues in the Neuse River Basin -- Neuse River estuary monitoring -- Nutrient cycling and algal blooms in the Neuse River estuary -- Atmospheric deposition of reduced nitrogen to estuarine waters -- Introduction: MIMS ecosystem modeling component integration efforts -- Application of the TOPLATS Land Surface Hydrology model, including strategies for modeling large river basins and coupling to saturated groundwater models -- Coupling a mesoscale meteorological model to a high-resolution land-surface hydrology model: review of results, current status, and future plans -- A high performance analytic element modeling of ground water flow -- A spatially distributed object-oriented model for simulating terrestrial water, carbon and nitrogen cycling and transport -- Issues and data needs for introducing nitrogenous pollutants from swine waste land application into an object-oriented model ecosystem model -- Developments of a Surface Water Object-Oriented Modeling System (SWOOMS) -- Mechanistic-based ecosystem exposure modeling on a watershed scale. Status of MIMS architecture design -- Dynamic Information Architecture System (DIAS) -- MMS -- Development of object-based simulation tools for distributed modular ecological modeling -- A toolbox for assembling spatially explicit multimedia ecological models for reusable components -- Object-oriented architecture for integrated multimedia model -- Software reuse and cluster computing tools for environmental model -- The coupling-mode extensions for the models-3 I/O PI: tools for building coupled cross-media models -- Model design for high-performance on microprocessor based parallel computer systems -- High performance computing for large scale environmental flow and transport processes -- High-performance environmental models for estuarine and coastal ecosystems -- Novel techniques for parallel simulations -- Tool-box for parallel simulation of flows in porous media.