Science Inventory

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Maui’s water basins are an engineering tool to facilitate precipitation of sediment during weather events. Unfortunately, these basins only facilitate the precipitation of coarse sediment grain sizes, leaving the finer sediment to overflow into the ocean. As fine sediment h...

We modeled nutrient management practices including residue management, cover crops, filter strips, grassed waterways, constructed wetlands, and reducing fertilizer in the upper East Fork of the Little Miami River, an 892 km2 watershed in southwestern Ohio, USA. The watershed is 6...

Biotic condition of streams with respect to nutrient pollution has been evaluated using biological indicators such as macroinvertebrate assemblages or periphyton communities, particularly diatoms. Molecular approaches have shown promise for this application, potentially because p...

VELMA - Visualizing Ecosystem Land Management Assessments, is a framework for creating ecohydrological models.  VELMA was designed to work in a variety of watersheds but increasing urban areas have created challenges for creating accurate models.  We have added a number...

Before the era of fossil fuel use, water provided power for industrial processes in the USA through a ubiquitous network of dams and mills. This infrastructure was constructed concurrently with widespread deforestation and sedimentation during the 18th through 20th centuries caus...

•       An updated version (2) of EPA’s River Basin Export Reduction Optimization Support Tool (RBEROST) has been developed to provide nutrient management strategies for the Puget Sound Basin.  RBEROST is an R-based tool that sets up ...

Development of effective pollution mitigation strategies require an understanding of the pollution sources and factors influencing fecal pollution loading. Fecal contamination of Turkey Creek in Gulfport, Mississippi, one of the nation's most endangered creeks, was studied throug...

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,...

Benthic diatoms are highly responsive to changes in environmental conditions associated with human activities. Their changes in assemblage structure can be used to develop stressor-response relationships, metrics, and indices that can help identify effects of pollution and inform...

Recent advancements in DNA techniques, metabarcoding, and bioinformatics could help expand the use of benthic diatoms in monitoring and assessment programs by providing relatively quick and increasingly cost-effective ways to quantify diatom diversity in environmental samples. Ho...

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...

Pages 150-167 of Lake Michigan 2020 Report Lake Michigan has undergone substantial biological change in the lower food web, as evidenced by lake-wide changes in primary productivity (Stadig et al., 2020), zooplankton abundance and composition (Barbiero et al., 2019), fish recruit...

The seasonal occurrence of deep-water hypoxia in western Long Island Sound (LIS) has been documented for decades by water quality cruise surveys and fixed mooring buoys. While previous studies have focused on factors modulating bottom dissolved oxygen (DO) at subtidal timescales,...

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...

EPA-ORD-CPHEA's Michael Pennino and Jana Compton were invited to present on groundwater nitrate at SSWR’s Quarterly Research Area Coordination Team (RACT) meeting for the Nutrients topic SSWR.4 on June 5,  2024.  This meeting brings together the research coordinat...

Although the offshore water of Lake Michigan has been below the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) total phosphorus (TP) spring target concentration of 7 µg L−1 for several decades, higher TP concentrations occur in the nearshore, contributing to the res...

Onsite wastewater treatment systems are a major source of excess nutrients and co-pollutants in groundwater. The high density of septic systems in New England’s coastal watersheds has degraded the quality of drinking and recreational freshwater resources and led to collapse...

This study investigated the presence and human hazards associated with pesticides and other anthropogenic chemicals identified in kale grown in urban and rural environments. Pesticides and related compounds (i.e., surfactants and metabolites) in kale samples were evaluated using ...

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) were a topic of great interest at the 2018 ASLO Summer Meeting in Victoria, B.C., Canada (Fig. 1). This was no surprise, since HABs may become – and already are in some areas – the greatest water quality threat to public health and aquatic ...

Water quality standards are important for protecting and restoring the condition of lakes, rivers, estuaries, and other water bodies in the United States. Given that nutrient pollution continues to be a widespread problem in aquatic systems, the development of numeric nutrient cr...

Excess nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) in lakes can lead to eutrophication, hypoxia, and algal blooms that may harm aquatic life and people.  Some U.S. states have established numeric water quality criteria for nutrients to protect surface waters.  However...

EPA Wildfire Research: Impacts on Air and Water Quality WESTAR-WRAP Spring Business Meeting 2024, Riverside, California Wildland fire smoke impacts millions of people in the United States every year. The EPA’s Office of Research and Development is addressing our increasingl...

In the US there are over 20,000 abandoned hardrock mines that may present risks to human health or the environment from long-term exposure to harmful substances. One site is the Formosa mine Superfund site located in Oregon, US. The site lacks plant cover due to phytotoxic tailin...

  The negative effects of nutrient pollution in streams, rivers, and downstream waterbodies remain widespread global problems. Understanding the cost-effectiveness of different strategies for mitigating nutrient pollution is critical to making informed decisions and definin...

Along urban streams and rivers, various processes, including road salt application, sewage leaks, and weathering of the built environment, contribute to novel chemical cocktails made up of metals, salts, nutrients, and organic matter. Due to heterogeneous land use and a myriad of...