Office of Research and Development Publications

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It is often of interest to model the incidence and duration of threshold exceedance events for an environmental variable over a set of monitoring locations. Such data arrive over continuous time and can be considered as observations of a two-state process yielding, sequentially, ...

Air pollution is intuitively associated with respiratory effects, but evidence has emerged over the past few decades that air pollution-related cardiovascular effects can be much more adverse and even lead to premature mortality. In 1997, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ...

Within the field of chemical safety assessment, there is a desire to replace costly whole organism testing with more efficient and cost-effective alternatives based on in vitro test systems. Disruption of thyroid hormone signaling via inhibition of enzymes called deiodinases is o...

Urban water systems consist of natural and engineered flows of water interacting in complex ways. System complexity can be understood via mass conservative models that account for the interrelationships among all major flows and storages. We have developed a generic urban water s...

The Maximum Cumulative Ratio (MCR) quantifies the degree to which a single chemical drives the cumulative risk of an individual exposed to multiple chemicals. Phthalates are a class of chemicals with ubiquitous exposures in the general population that have the potential to cause ...

Epiphytes on seagrass (Zostera marina) growing in the lower intertidal were examined along an estuarine gradient within Yaquina Bay, Oregon over a period of 4 years. The Yaquina Estuary receives high levels of nutrients from the watershed during the wet season and from the ocean...

Predictive testing to characterise substances for their skin sensitisation potential has historically been based on animal models such as the Local Lymph Node Assay (LLNA) and the Guinea Pig Maximisation Test (GPMT). In recent years, EU regulations, have provided a strong incenti...

Although metal(loid) bioaccessibility of ambient particulate matter, with an aerodynamic diameter of <10 μm (PM10), has recently received increasing attention, limited research exists into standardising in-vitro methodologies using simulated lung fluid (SLF). Contradictions exist...

A facility-wide estrogen budget model was developed to assess the excretion of natural estrogens by swine in a commercial swine farrowing concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) in North Carolina, using an object oriented Bayesian network (OOBN) approach. The OOBN model is ...

Until recently, most of energy and industrially produced chemicals were derived from fossil fuel-based resources. This along with the continued depletion of finite fossil resources and their attributed adverse environmental impacts, alternatively sourced and more sustainable reso...

The ongoing evolution of mixing models has resulted in a confusing array of software tools that differ in terms of data inputs, model assumptions, and associated analytic products. Here we introduce MixSIAR, an inclusive, rich, and flexible open-source Bayesian stable isotope mix...

A newly developed integrated cell culture reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR (ICC-RTqPCR) method and its applicability in UV disinfection studies is described. This method utilizes a singular cell culture system coupled with four RTqPCR assays to detect infectious serotypes t...

A vast amount of future climate scenario datasets, created by climate models such as general circulation models (GCMs), have been used in conjunction with watershed models to project future climate variability impact on hydrological processes and water quality. However, these low...

Quantifying sporadic waterborne infections in community settings can be challenging. Salivary antibody immunoassays are a promising non-invasive tool that can be used in prospective studies of common infections, especially those involving children. This study was conducted in a...

Select volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in ambient air were measured at four fenceline sites at a petroleum refinery in Whiting, Indiana, USA using modified EPA Method 325 A/B with passive tubes and EPA Compendium Method TO-15 with canister samplers. One-week, time-integrated s...

The assessment of community well-being is critical as an end-point measure that will facilitate decision support and assist in the identification of sustainable solutions to address persistent problems. While the overall measure is important, it is equally vital to distinguish va...

Over the past decade, a range of sensor technologies became available on the market, enabling a revolutionary shift in air pollution monitoring and assessment. With their cost of up to three orders of magnitude lower than standard/reference instruments, many avenues for applicati...

The assessment and monitoring of soil disturbance and its effect on soil quality (i.e., ability to support a range of ecosystem services) has been hindered due to the shortcomings of many traditional analytical techniques, including high cost, long-term time investment and diffic...

The heart of forensic science is application of the scientific method and analytical approaches to answer questions central to solving a crime: Who, What, When, Where, and How. Forensic practitioners use fundamentals of chemistry and physics to examine evidence and infer its orig...

Phytotoxicity results from the publicly-available ECOTOX database were summarized for 20 chemicals and 188 aquatic plants to determine species sensitivities and the ability of a species-limited toxicity data set to serve as a surrogate for a larger data set. The lowest effect con...

Arsenic (As) is one of the most widespread, toxic elements in the environment, and human activities have resulted in a large number of contaminated areas. However abundant, the potential of As toxicity from exposure to contaminated soils is limited to the fraction that will disso...

Under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Arsenic Demonstration Program, an iron removal (IR) process consisting of permanganate oxidation followed by GreensandPlus™ filtration was shown to be effective in removing soluble As(III) (24.1 μg/L on average) from Waynesville, IL ...

Coral reef condition on the south shore of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, was assessed at various distances from Charlotte Amalie, the most densely populated city on the island. Human influence in the area includes industrial activity, wastewater discharge, cruise ship docks, a...

Abstract Background levels of a regional attribute, such as aquatic specific conductivity (SC), may be assessed using the basic assessment approach of planning, analysis, and synthesis. We demonstrate the approach by assessing whether the background SC is sufficiently similar ...

The epidemic of Zika in the Western hemisphere has led to intense investigations of all species important in the transmission of Zika virus (ZikV), including putative mosquito vectors. Although evidence points to Stegomyia (= Aedes) (Diptera: Culicidae) mosquitoes as the primary ...