Radioactivity in the ocean: laws and biological effects

This paper summarizes the literature on US laws and international agreements, experimental and monitoring data, and ongoing studies to provide background information for environmental assessment and regulatory compliance activities for ocean dumping of low-level radioactive waste. The Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act is the major US legislation governing ocean disposal of radioactive waste. The major international agreement on ocean dumping is the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and other Matter. The United States ended its ocean dumping of radioactive wastes in 1970, but other countries have continued ocean dumping under international supervision in the northeast Atlantic. Monitoring of former US disposal sites has neither revealed significant effects on marine biota nor indicated a hazard to human health. Also, no effects on marine organisms have been found that could be attributed to routine discharges into the Irish Sea from the Windscale reprocessing plant. We must improve our ability to predict the oceanic carrying capacity and the fate and effects of ionizing radiation in the marine environment

Managing cumulative impacts: A key to sustainability?

This paper addresses how science can be more effectively used in creating policy to manage cumulative effects on ecosystems. The paper focuses on the scientific techniques that we have to identify and to assess cumulative impacts on ecosystems. The term ``sustainable development`` was brought into common use by the World Commission on Environment and Development (The Brundtland Commission) in 1987. The Brundtland Commission report highlighted the need to simultaneously address developmental and environmental imperatives simultaneously by calling for development that ``meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations.`` We cannot claim to be working toward sustainable development until we can quantitatively assess cumulative impacts on the environment: The two concepts are inextricibally linked in that the elusiveness of cumulative effects likely has the greatest potential of keeping us from achieving sustainability. In this paper, assessment and management frameworks relevant to cumulative impacts are discussed along with recent literature on how to improve such assessments. When possible, examples are given for marine ecosystems

Watershed assessment and in-stream monitoring

This paper provides a brief introduction to fundamental issues for watershed and regional assessments and identifies the needs for physical, chemical, and biological monitoring and research to be designed and integrated to support such assessments. Regional management requires organizing paradigms or conceptual models, and an assessment framework can serve this purpose; risk assessment is used as an example. Spatial scale (watersheds and ecoregions) can also serve as a strong organizing paradigm for management The role of federal and state monitoring and assessment programs is discussed with examples for biomonitoring. The two classes of biomonitoring methods are discussed: ecological surveys and toxicity testing. Biological criteria can provide an appropriate reference for monitoring and assessment and can establish statistical and ecological (practical) significance. This paper is based on Chapter 5 of Water Environment Federation`s new book, Biomonitoring, in the Water Environment

Empirical Relationships Between Watershed Attributes and Headwater Lake Chemistry in the Adirondack Region

Surface water acidification may be caused or influenced by both natural watershed processes and anthropogenic actions. Empirical models and observational data can be useful for identifying watershed attributes or processes that require further research or that should be considered in the development of process models. This study focuses on the Adirondack region of New York and has two purposes: to (1) develop empirical models that can be used to assess the chemical status of lakes for which no chemistry data exist and (2) determine on a regional scale watershed attributes that account for variability in lake pH and acid-neutralizing capacity (ANC). Headwater lakes, rather than lakes linked to upstream lakes, were selected for initial analysis. The Adirondacks Watershed Data Base (AWDB), part of the Acid Deposition Data Network maintained at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), integrates data on physiography, bedrock, soils, land cover, wetlands, disturbances, beaver activity, land use, and atmospheric deposition with the water chemistry and morphology for the watersheds of 463 headwater lakes. The AWD8 facilitates both geographic display and statistical analysis of the data. The report, An Adirondack Watershed Data Base: Attribute and Mapping Information for Regional Acidic Deposition Studies (ORNL/TM--10144), describes the AWDB. Both bivariate (correlations and Wilcoxon and Kruskal-Wallis tests) and multivariate analyses were performed. Fifty-seven watershed attributes were selected as input variables to multiple linear regression and discriminant analysis. For model development -200 lakes for which pH and ANC data exist were randomly subdivided into a specification and a verification data set. Several indices were used to select models for predicting lake pH (31 variables) and ANC (27 variables). Twenty-five variables are common to the pH and ANC models: four lake morphology, nine soil/geology, eight land cover, three disturbance, and one watershed aspect. An atmospheric input variable (H{sup +} or NO{sub 3}{sup -}) explains the greatest amount of variation in the dependent variable (pH and ANC) for both models. The percentage of watershed in conifers is the next strongest predictor variable. For all headwater lakes in the Adirondacks, -60% of the lakes are estimated to have an ANC {le}50 {micro}eq/L, and 40% of the lakes have a pH {le}5.5, levels believed to be detrimental to some fish species

Landscape characterization for watershed management

Streams and rivers serve as integrators of terrestrial landscape characteristics and as recipients of pollutants from both the atmosphere and the land; thus, large rivers are especially good indicators of cumulative impacts. Landscape ecologists seek to better understand the relationships between landscape structure and ecosystem processes at various spatial scales. Understanding how scale, both data resolution and geographic extent, influences landscape characterization and how terrestrial processes affect water quality are critically important for model development and translation of research results from experimental watersheds to management of large drainage basins. Measures of landscape structure are useful to monitor change and assess the risks it poses to ecological resources. Many studies have shown that the proportion of different land uses within a watershed can account for some of the variability in surface water quality. Hunsaker and Levine showed that both proportion of land uses and the spatial pattern of land uses is important for characterizing and modeling water quality; however, proportion consistently accounted for the most variance (40% to 86%) across a range of watershed sizes (1000 to 1.35 million ha). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is performing a demonstration of its Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) for the Mid-Atlantic Region. One activity, the Mid-Atlantic Integrated Assessment, is designed as a collaborative initiative between EPA`s Office of Research and Development and EPA`s Region III

TERRAIN: A computer program to process digital elevation models for modeling surface flow

This document provides a step by step procedure, TERRAIN, for processing digital elevation models to calculate overland flow paths, watershed boundaries, slope, and aspect. The algorithms incorporated into TERRAIN have been used at two different geographic scales: first for small research watersheds where surface wetness measurements are made, and second for regional water modeling for entire counties. For small areas methods based on flow distribution may be more desirable, especially if time-dependent flow models are to be used. The main improvement in TERRAIN compared with earlier programs on which it is based is that it combines the conditioning routines, which remove depressions to avoid water storage, into a single process. Efficiency has also been improved, reducing run times as much as 10:1 and enabling the processing of very large grids in strips for regional modeling. Additionally, the ability to calculate the nutrient load delivered any cell in a watershed has been added. These improvements make TERRAIN a powerful tool for modeling surface flow