These web tutorials present important information about environmental science and regulations that you can watch online or download and watch at your leisure. They are longer than my blog posts and provide a different approach to the subjects of the documents in the Knowledge Base. If there’s a topic about which you’d like to learn more, contact me (see below).
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Inorganic metals and organic toxic chemicals in water, sediments, soils, or rocks concern everyone. Most people are seriously concerned with toxins that effect human and environmental health. A major characteristic of toxic geochemicals is that they tend to occur at very low concentrations; many times not being detected or quantified at all by the analytical chemical lab. These non-detected (or censored) results too often are mis-handled by ignoring them or substituting some arbitrary number in their stead.
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This tutorial explains the benefits of a process that maximizes the value of your environmental data, then describes the process in detail. There are two main reasons all environmental permit holders need this data management process: First, when regulators, NGOs, local groups, and others allege that an operation or project harms the environment their claim is always based on data. Specifically, the data you collect for baseline studies or permit compliance monitoring.
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Environmental regulations should be based on technically sound and legally defensible data analyses that are interpreted using the best available science. This tutorial compares mathematical deterministic process models with stochastic statistical models to answer regulatory decision-making questions. The models used to support environmental regulations under conditions of uncertainty have not kept pace with our increased understanding of ecosystems and their responses to human industrial activities, nor to advances in statistics that fit the unique attributes of environmental data.
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Total maximum daily loads, TMDLs, are the tool used by environmental regulators to address nonpoint source pollution under the Clean Water Act. The CWA’s policies and goals are that, “It is the national policy that programs for the control of nonpoint sources of pollution be developed and implemented in an expeditious manner so as to enable the goals of this Act to be met through the control of both point and nonpoint sources of pollution.