Science Inventory

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Seagrass beds&nbsp;play a critical role in biodiversity maintenance, serving as nursery habitats for fisheries, and aiding in carbon and sediment sequestration in the ecosystem. These habitats receive dissolved and particulate material inputs, like nutrients and heavy metals, aff...

The U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development, Regions 5, 7 and 8 and EPA Office of Water hosted a multi-regional harmful algal bloom (HABs) workshop on February 4 - 6, 2020 at the University of Kansas Edwards Campus in Overland Park, Kansas. The workshop brought together State...

This is a requested presentation from the Upper Mississippi River Basin Water Quality Task force on EPA ORD's nutrients and harmful algal bloom research in the Mississippi River Basin and Region 7. The presentation covers several research projects related to predicting harmful al...

Update on SSWR Nutrients and HABs research for Region 5 States meeting. This presentation covers research that addresses nutrient pollution and&nbsp; HABs forecasting. Where possible, we have highlighted nutrient reduction related to nonpoint sources including agriculture and sep...

Wildfire is a characteristic disturbance process affecting ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest (PNW). However, 150 years of intensive management and resource extraction across diverse PNW ecosystems complicates our understanding of how fire interacts with various ecological proce...

Targeted conservation approaches seek to focus resources on areas where they can deliver the greatest benefits and are recognized as key to reducing nonpoint source nutrients from agricultural landscapes into sensitive receiving waters. Moreover, there is growing recognition of t...

Our presentation to EPA's Region 5 Water Quality Monitoring Managers Meeting describes how we made statewide predictions of total phosphorus concentrations in Indiana rivers and streams. We outline the three datasets needed to make such predictions. The first being the Indiana De...

Wildland fires in the United States (U.S.) have increased in frequency and area burned since the mid-1980s. This trend is most pronounced in the western United States, and to a lesser extent in the nation&rsquo;s southeastern region. Historic fire suppression policies have result...

To provide recommendations for establishment of plants on a low pH mine tailings, we conducted greenhouse studies on the effects of gasified conifer softwood waste biochar (BC) plus other amendments to improve the survival and growth of plants. Experiment 1 indicated that 1% lime...

Anthropogenic impacts on lake and stream water quality are well established but have been much less studied in wetlands.&nbsp; Here we use data from the 2016 National Wetland Condition Assessment to characterize water quality and its relationship to anthropogenic pressure for inl...

Coastal eutrophication is a prevalent and increasing threat to the healthy functioning of ecosystems globally. While degraded water quality can be detected by monitoring oxygen, dissolved nutrient concentrations, chlorophyll, and algal abundance, establishing regulatory guideline...

In collaboration with University of Washington and NOAA marine ecosystem modelers participating in the new Puget Sound Integrated Modeling Framework ( PSIMF ) project, ORD&rsquo;s VELMA watershed modeling team is estimating environmental impacts of alternative future land use and...

Estuaries provide valuable ecosystem services, including biodiversity, flood and storm protection, recreation, tourism, and food. Anthropogenic and natural loadings of nutrients can cause eutrophication, resulting in hypoxic zones; increased algae growth, including hazardous alga...

Eutrophication due to anthropogenic nutrient loading has resulted in an increase in the geographic area, frequency, intensity, and duration of hypoxic events within coastal environments. Eutrophication, and additional pathways of hypoxia such as freshwater-induced stratification,...

Complex, dynamic human-environment coupled water systems require a paradigm shift from the traditional “siloed” (drinking water, wastewater, stormwater etc.) management approach and a move towards more holistic approaches to address the multiple issues facing municipal water syst...

Abstract/presentation for a the session &ldquo;Methods and Data for Cumulative Impact Assessment in the Context of Environmental Justice&rdquo; at the 2023 North America SETAC 44th Annual Meeting (November 12-16, 2023).&nbsp; Invited to contribute a talk highlighting the National...

Excess nutrient release to the environment is a nonpoint source pollution issue in many US surface waters, and thus no single entity has complete jurisdiction to address and solve the problem. While it is within EPA's authority under the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Safe D...

Seagrass health is often used as an indicator of water quality and plant tissue nitrogen content has long been used as an indicator of nitrogen availability.&nbsp; However, traditional tissue nitrogen content has not been a particularly sensitive early indicator of nutrient avail...

Nutrient pollution continues to impact water quality and degrade coastal ecosystems. Coastal eutrophication assessments are useful tools to track the effects of nutrient over-enrichment at large-scales and over time. These assessments often use response variables including chloro...

In 2021, GLTED scientists and collaborators participated in the Lake Michigan Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative. Our research team was responsible for analyzing nutrient chlorophyll a and zooplankton monitoring data from the field year. We analyzed for spatial differe...

Nitrogen isotopes are frequently used as an indicator of anthropogenic nitrogen loading at the local or regional scale. We were interested in assessing nitrogen isotope response in estuaries across the continental United States. In the summer of 2015, the EPA&rsquo;s National Coa...

The San Juan Bay Estuary (SJBE) is an estuarine system situated in highly developed and urbanized San Juan, Puerto Rico. Due to increased residential development in the 1950s, the Ca&ntilde;o Mart&iacute;n Pe&ntilde;a (CMP), a channel which connects lagoons to the bay has increas...

Anthropogenic salt inputs have increasingly impacted many streams in the U.S. for more than a century. Urban stream salinity is often chronically elevated and punctuated by episodic salinization events after applications of road salt, which can last hours to days after snowstorms...

Diatoms are excellent indicators of water quality and can be used as a tool for biological assessment. Aquatic ecosystems span across state boundaries and the northeast states have a long-standing interest in taking a regional approach to developing water quality criteria for lak...

This presentation highlights challenges and strategies for applying mechanistic simulation models to decision making. Case studies are presented using ORD's Coastal Generalized Ecosystem Model (CGEM), emphasizing different results and applications from the northern Gulf of Mexico...