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Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry at EPA's Western Ecology Division
Citation:
Markwiese, James, C. Andersen, Reneej Brooks, M. Johnson, P. Mayer, A. Nahlik, D. Olszyk, AND J. Reichman. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry at EPA's Western Ecology Division. SETAC PNW, Corvallis, Oregon, March 08 - 10, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The EPA's Western Ecology Division (WED) comprises a diverse group of biologists, field ecologists, chemists, toxicologists, genomics experts, plant physiologists, mathematical modelers and computer programmers and our mission and our passion is to protect human health and the environment. This talk for the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry provides an overview of the exciting work being currently being carried out at WED.
Description:
The facility for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Western Ecology Division (WED) has been involved in environmental toxicology and chemistry research since its inception in 1961 when it was the Pacific Northwest Water Laboratory. Currently, WED is one of four ecological effects divisions of the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, distributed bio-geographically on the coasts, and our mission is: 1) to provide EPA with national scientific leadership for terrestrial and regional-scale ecology; and, 2) to develop the scientific basis for assessing the condition of aquatic resources and their response to natural and anthropogenic stresses. Key scientific disciplines at WED include: terrestrial and aquatic ecology, landscape ecology, wildlife biology, plant physiology, biotechnology, toxicology, biogeochemistry, oceanography, geography, geospatial statistics, economics, ecological risk assessment and systems modeling. The Division seeks to advance scientific understanding through experiments, field studies, modeling, and analysis of large-scale environmental and ecological data sets. Scientists at WED provide technical support to EPA’s national Offices, Regions, States and Tribes. Our ultimate objective is to be certain that the best available research information and analytical tools are available to the Agency and scientific community. At this conference of the SETAC Pacific Northwest Chapter you will hear about exciting work WED scientists are doing on heavy metals in wetland soils, using stable isotopes to understand fate and transport of nutrients than can lead to eutrophication, how pyrolized organic matter (biochar) can help attenuate heavy metal contamination in soil and facilitate land remediation, how engineered nanomaterials move and are transformed in the environment and their effect on plant genomics and how the built environment affects the fate and transport of heavy metals and nutrients in urban areas.