Office of Research and Development Publications

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Shallow continental shelves support productive pelagic and benthic communities. This study examined primary productivity at a shallow shelf region in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico focusing on the effect of light on water column and benthic productivity at water depths between 1...

Our previous work has shown that the Jackson Lakes, in the Bayou Chico Watershed in NW FL, USA, are biogeochemically different and have different microbial communities, despite their proximity and common origin. All three lakes are polymictic, but the NE lake is fully freshwater,...

Potential environmental impacts of oil spills are a concern for the Canadian public and the oil industry. Optimizing methods to treat residual oil that remains after an oil spill cleanup and to assess the potential impacts of residual oil in impacted freshwater systems are both h...

Standard ecological risk assessment practices often rely on larval and juvenile fish toxicity data as representative of the amphibian aquatic stage. Although empirical evidence suggests fish early life stage tests frequently are sufficiently sensitive to protect larval amphibians...

In the northern Gulf of Mexico, nutrients from upstream agricultural fertilization and river runoff are delivered to the Louisiana Continental Shelf (LCS) via the Mississippi-Atchafalaya river basin. This increased nutrient loading stimulates a phytoplankton bloom; as the resulti...

Coastal watersheds have become increasingly urbanized resulting in declines in ecosystem goods and services (EGS) to community beneficiaries. Urbanization includes increases in impervious surface, decreases in access to greenspace, and declines in both air and water quality. The ...

Recently, the U.S. Environmenttal Protection Agency (EPA) adopted a new approach to study and manage environmental problems. In the past, the agency's emphasis was on particular pollutants and their effects on individual species in air, land, and water. But the environment is not...

Contamination of surface waters often leads to drinking water contamination, degradation of aquatic biota and their habitat and ultimately the decline of the quality of life for both humans and animals. Pathogen contamination, as determined by bacterial fecal indicators, is the l...

As Ecological risk assessments (ERA) move beyond organism-based determinations towards probabilistic population-level assessments, model complexity must be evaluated against the goals of the assessment, the information available to parameterize components with minimal dependence ...

Alkyl homologs of the two ring PAH naphthalene and single ring aromatics were identified as primary chemicals of concern in spilled oil in early studies of petrogenic PAHs because of their relatively high abundance, water solubility, and rapid partitioning into aquatic organisms....

Changes in size at and time to metamorphosis indicate developmental effects in amphibians that could result in population-level impacts. Current risk assessment practice uses early life stage fish data when data for larval amphibians are not available. While fish are sufficiently...

The Final ecosystem goods and services (FEGS) concept has become increasingly valuable for identifying and evaluating important trade-offs in estuarine management, yet the translation of FEGS science into policy is limited by a need for meaningful reference points that facilitate...

The RESES team worked, with extensive input from the community, to identify the ecosystem services that the Ouachita River provide and how that contributes to the community’s well-being. The work began by identifying the community’s values and goals and how they contr...

Evaluating long-term contaminant effects on wildlife populations depends on spatial information about habitat quality, heterogeneity in contaminant exposure, and sensitivities and distributions of species integrated into a systems modeling approach. Rarely is this information rea...

Understanding saltwater intrusion into freshwater coastal wetlands requires long-term historical salinity data, which are often not available in most tidal river systems. This study developed an artificial neural network (ANN) modelling tool to elucidate the relationship between ...

Gulf Ecology Division research ecologist Dr. Deborah Santavy, along with Susan Jackson from the Office of Water’s Office of Science and Technology (OW-OST), presented a webinar on July 16, 2019 to update our NOAA partners in the Coral Reef Conservation Program on the fish a...

Hepatic steatosis (fatty liver disease) is a pathological condition that may alter xenobiotic metabolism, thereby increasing susceptibility to environmental toxicants. Here we used a metabolically competent human liver-derived cell line – HepaRG – to model steatosis f...

The Flint Hills of eastern Kansas and northern Oklahoma is home to the largest remaining contiguous grassland prairie in the United States. Throughout the prairie, burning is a common practice used to preserve the prairie from encroachment of woody species such as eastern Red Ced...

Ecosystem services (ES) are defined as the outputs of ecological processes that contribute to human welfare or have the potential to do so in the future, and include the production of food and drinking water, purification of air and water, pollination, and nutrient cycling. The n...

Because of natural environmental and faunal differences and scientific perspectives, numerous indices of biological integrity (IBIs) have been developed at local state, and regional scales in the USA. These multiple IBIs, plus different criteria for judging impairment, hinder ri...

Every ecosystem is subject to multiple stressors arising from the interactions of biological, physical, and socioeconomic processes (e.g. exploitation and development). These stressors and their interactions need to be identified if risks associated with a planned activity are to...

Ecological restoration projects are a means to restore natural systems to a functional state where they can once again provide benefits to people. Decision makers can prioritize restoration projects based on the ability of proposed sites to provide benefits to people, allowing be...

A map of ecoregions of the Upper Midwest States was compiled to give managers of aquatic and terrestrial resources a better understanding of the regional patterns of attainable quality of these resources. The ecoregions represent areas that are relatively homogeneous in patterns ...

A four step approach was developed for evaluating toxicity data on a chemical mixture for consistency with dose addition. Following the concepts in the U.S. EPA mixture guidance (EPA 2000), toxicologic interaction for a defined mixture (all components known) is departure from a c...

Disinfection byproducts (DBPs), including haloacetic acids (HAAs), are formed when oxidizing disinfectants react with inorganic and organic matter in water. Drinking water is assayed routinely for 9 HAAs (HAA9): chloro-, dichloro-, trichloro-, bromo-, dibromo-, tribrorno-, bromoc...