Office of Research and Development Publications

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This forecasting approach may be useful for water managers and associated public health managers to predict near-term future high-risk cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (cyanoHAB) occurrence. Freshwater cyanoHABs may grow to excessive concentrations and cause human, animal, and...

The National Water Model (NWM) provides critical analyses and projections of streamflow that support water management decisions. However, the NWM performs poorly in lower elevation rivers of the western United States (U.S.). The accuracy of the NWM depends on the fideli...

The use of camera and video technologies for conducting underwater surveys has rapidly expanded over the past several decades. However, the utility of these systems can be significantly hampered by numerous logistical factors, including limited underwater visibility, rough bottom...

An overview of EPA ORD research on water reuse will be presented to the general public at of local event called Science on Tap. 

Human well-being relies on goods and services provided by ecosystems to sustain our society, human health, and economy, and they are often assumed to be available for free. Decision and policy makers struggle how best to protect and manage natural habitats and resources while bal...

Approximately half a billion people globally depend upon coral reef ecosystems for food, coastal protection, tourism and fisheries. Coral reefs buffer adjacent shorelines from wave action and prevent erosion, property damage and loss of life. A recent USGS report estimates the an...

Most coral reef studies focus on scleractinian (stony) corals to indicate reef condition, but there are other prominent assemblages that play a role in ecosystem structure and function. In Puerto Rico these include fish, gorgonians, and sponges. The U.S. Environmental Protection ...

The advancement of protein structural prediction tools, exemplified by AlphaFold and Iterative Threading ASSEmbly Refinement, has enabled the prediction of protein structures across species based on available protein sequence and structural data. In this study, we introduce an in...

Effective conservation planning for species of concern requires long-term monitoring data that can accurately estimate population trends. Supplemental or alternative methods for estimating population trends are necessary for species that are poorly sampled by traditional breeding...

Toxicity translation uses quantitative models to interpret standard toxcity data as endpoints amenable to population-level risk assessment. 

Marketed sunscreens contain chemical or mineral ultra-violet (UV) filters, many of which have been shown to act as endocrine disruptors in animals. Over the past decade there has been an increasing concern of the potential toxicological effects of chemical-based sunscreens, large...

Presenting a graduate course lecture on a new methodology (SWATH) for proteomics that can be used in ecotoxicology studies.

The EPA Transcriptomic Assessment Product (ETAP) is a human health assessment that utilizes a standardized short-term in vivo study design and data analysis procedures to develop transcriptomic-based reference values for data poor chemicals. The reference value represents the dai...

A mutual effort between US Dept of Energy, EPA, and Israel's Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has continued to address what is needed to recover from a radiological dispersal device (RDD) attack.  Beginning in July 2022, three subgroups (technology, public health and communications) c...

The use of quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) to estimate Enterococcus spp. levels allows for same day notification of recreational water quality conditions, representing a major advance over traditional cultured-based methods that require 18 or more hours to obtain results. &nbsp...

Genetic technologies are now available that can provide same day notification of fecal pollution levels using enterococci and E. coli, as well as provide fecal pollution information for human, ruminant, canine, and avian sources in recreational water samples.  These methodol...

I investigated the practice of managed aquifer recharge (MAR) of mountain front runoff in the Central Valley of California, USA, as a strategy to improve groundwater storage and availability to community drinking water wells.  The area of interest of the modeling study is th...

Background: Enterococci are ubiquitous in wastewater, which can contaminate surface waters, including recreational water, via many pathways, providing a route of exposure for humans Antibiotic resistant Enterococcus spp. are among the leading causes of nosocomial infections world...

This hedonic study assesses the impact of remediated and cleaned brownfield sites, in contrast to unremediated sites, on residential property values in Fulton County, Georgia over a 23-year period.  As defined in the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitaliza...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) has been using Hester-Dendy (HD) multi-plate artificial substrate samplers as part of their standard monitoring protocols for over a decade at Great Lakes Area of Concern (AOC) sites. To bet...

The Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) Community Scoping Tool is a structured decision making tool that allows community-level decision makers to take a transparent, repeatable, and defendable approach for identifying the highest priority EGS for their management actions. ...

Most of us are comfortable with a research framework that starts with foundational knowledge from the literature and builds on our own work to date. This allows us to ask new iterations of these questions focused on the environment. However, sometimes we want to extend our resear...

Determining how colonization condition affects the structure of the macroinvertebrate community in stream mesocosm studies is important for experimental design and understanding the relevance of exposure studies. Until recently, dosing study priorities for the USEPA Experimental ...

Stream tributaries can be impacted by a myriad of fecal pollution sources that contribute to water quality impairment in receiving waters.  Strategic water quality monitoring of tributaries can enhance the ability to identify fecal pollution sources to better protect human h...

How does the extent and configuration of landscape metrics and onsite stressors interact with Euclidean and stream network distances to explain variation in stream condition index in a river basin? I am using data from Virginia Department of Environmental Quality's Probabilistic ...