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Increased nutrient fluxes from the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) have been linked to increased occurrences of seasonal hypoxia in the northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM) (The NSTC, 2000; USEPA, 2014; Alexander et al., 2008; Rabalais et al., 2001). Studies additionally show that more t...

The Model for Prediction Across Scales &ndash; Atmosphere (MPAS-A) is the meteorological foundation for a next generation global air quality modeling system currently being developed at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). In recent years, meteorological fields for r...

There is always a challenge of obtaining the &ldquo;best&rdquo; data to inform environmental models. Here we present different types of available precipitation datasets while detailing temporal and spatial resolution, potential errors in the dataset, and optimal performance scena...

Despite its importance to transportation safety and ecosystem health related to pollutant and nutrient deposition, the simulation of fog lags the simulation of other meteorological phenomena due in large part to its complexity and limitations of model resolution. Accordingly, th...

Environmental surface waters often contain a variety of chemical contaminants from different sources including wastewater treatment plants, concentrated animal feeding operations, agricultural runoff and other human-related activities. Exposure to these contaminants may pose a th...

Green infrastructure (GI) represents a broad set of stormwater control measures practices that can be flexibly implemented to increase sewershed retention capacity, and can thereby improve on the management of water quantity and quality. Although much GI presents as formal engine...

As emissions reductions are desired in end-use sectors –commercial/residential technologies and light- and heavy-duty vehicles – the corresponding changes in fuel use and technologies can lead to shifts in the upstream production processes. These “upstream” emissions can be assoc...

The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework represents an ideal tool for integrating diverse data relating chemical exposures to adverse outcomes. Glucocorticoid signaling is tightly controlled and numerous adverse health outcomes have been associated with either elevation or sup...

From determining what to have for lunch to deciding where to invest our resources, we, as individuals and societies, are constantly involved in multi-criteria assessment. Using sustainability assessment as a case study, in this talk I will demonstrate the ubiquity of multi-crite...

The Nooksack-Fraser transboundary area is home to communities with a strong base in farming, fisheries and outdoor recreation. A goal of the Nooksack-Fraser Transboundary Nitrogen (NFT-N) project is to determine the sources and fates of N in the watershed using data on energy us...

Indicators of a stream&rsquo;s ability to remove nutrients provide insights on watershed integrity and stream habitat characteristics that are needed to help managers to restore stream ecosystem services. We used the Tracer Additon Spiraling Characterization Curve (TASCC) to mea...

Indicators of a stream&rsquo;s ability to remove nutrients provide insights on watershed integrity and managers&rsquo; ability to restore ecosystem services based on specific characteristics of stream habitat. We used the Tracer Additon Spiraling Characterization Curve (TASCC) t...

This is the presentation for the invited lecture at Rutgers University. The lecture will be part of online course titled "Sustainability Decision Tools" in Spring 2018.

Researchers who perform air quality modeling studies usually do so on a regional scale. Typically, the boundary conditions are generated by another model which might have a different chemical mechanism, spatial resolution, and/or map projection. Hence, a necessary conversion/inte...

Alternative toxicity methods to characterize the hazards of chemical substances have been proposed to reduce animal testing and efficiently screen thousands of chemicals. Relevant resources include large in vitro datasets from efforts such as the high-throughput screening (HTS) T...

U.S. EPA’s Rapid Exposure and Dosimetry (RED) project provides tools to rapidly generate quantitative human exposure and internal dose estimates. To support identification of likely sources of chemicals found in biological media through non-targeted/suspect screening analysis (SS...

The deleterious effects of microplastic ingestion by marine organisms and the impacts across trophic levels are widely unknown. Due to the extensive ecological and socioeconomic benefits provided by coral reefs, investigating the impacts of microplastics on reef ecosystems is of ...

Application of in vitro based safety assessment requires reconciling chemical concentrations sufficient to produce bioactivity in vitro with those that trigger a molecular initiating event at the relevant in vivo target site. To address such need, computational tools such as phy...

New approach methodologies (NAMs) based on high-throughput screening (HTS) assays can test large numbers of chemicals for bioactivity but interpretation of the data remains a challenge, especially for complex processes such as developmental toxicity. A pragmatic solution is to ma...

To date, most research focused on developing more efficient and cost effective methods to predict toxicity have focused on human biology. However, there is also a need for effective high throughput tools to predict toxicity to other species that perform critical ecosystem functio...

Tens of thousands of chemicals are currently in commerce, and hundreds more are introduced every year. Because current chemical testing is resource intensive, only a small fraction of chemicals have been fully evaluated for potential human health effects. To address this challen...

Goal: Determine whether in vitro bioactivity from broad high-throughput screening studies (e.g., ToxCast) can be used as a conservative point-of-departure and when compared with exposure estimates serve to prioritize chemicals for future study or as lower tier risk assessment. En...

This follow up to a 2016 international workshop continues to bring together international regulators to discuss progress and barriers in applying new approach methods (NAMs) to prioritization, screening, and quantitative risk assessment. Updates to ongoing collaborative case stud...

The tides of acceptance of new alternative methods (NAMs) are changing. Numerous scientific papers have been published recently that explore the boundaries of data applicability and propose approaches that bridge new and conventional methods. The modernization of the Toxic Substa...

EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology is developing automated workflows for curating large databases within the DSSTox project, and providing accurate linkages of data to chemical structures, exposure and hazard information. The data are made available via the EPA’s...