With the increasing awareness of environmental protection worldwide, it is becoming more and more important to evaluate the effects of chemical substances on the natural environment. With pesticides being intentionally released into the natural environment to protect crops from harmful insects, weeds and pathogenic microorganisms, countries worldwide, with Europe and the United States taking th...

Vegetable oils and fats make up a significant part of the energy intake in typical European diets. However, their use as ingredients in a diverse range of different foods means that their consumption is often hidden, especially when oils and fats are used for cooking. As a result, there are no reliable estimates of the consumption of different vegetable oils and fats in the diet of European con...

Recently, several researchers have attempted to address Deepwater Horizon incident environmental fate and effects issues using laboratory testing and extrapolation procedures that are not fully reliable measures for environmental assessments. The 2013 Rico-Martínez et al. publication utilized laboratory testing approaches that severely limit our ability to reliably extrapolate such results to m...

Most product environmental assessments are based on manufacturer-supplied data on the material content of the product. This paper explores the potential for the material content of key components to be estimated with theoretical calculations. Two examples, the amount of cadmium in a nickel-cadmium battery and the amount of lead in a TV or computer CRT monitor, are developed. Both an upper and a...

This paper approaches the non-destructive analysis of corrosion damage by testing and evaluating several image segmentation schemes for the detection of decay areas. The application test bed for algorithmic evaluation considers stonework surfaces for corrosion damage. Each of the detection approaches handles in a different way the background inhomogeneities. A semi-automated framework for valid...

Supervisory Soil Scientist, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station located at the Station's Research Work Unit at Tempe, in cooperation with Arizona State University. Headquarters is in Fort Collins, in cooperation with Colorado State University. Abstract: Mediterranean ecosystems can be harvested, undergo type conversion, or be burned. Both wildfires and prescr...

Recent efforts to update cumulative risk assessment procedures to incorporate nonchemical stressors ranging from physical to psychosocial reflect increased interest in consideration of the totality of variables affecting human health and the growing desire to develop community-based risk assessment methods. A key roadblock is the uncertainty as to how nonchemical stressors behave in relationshi...

Exposure to environmental chemicals can have negative consequences for wildlife and even cause localized population extinctions. Resistance to chemical stress, however, can evolve and the mechanisms include desensitized target sites, reduced chemical uptake and increased metabolic detoxification and sequestration. Chemical resistance in wildlife populations can also arise independently of expos...

As part of comprehensive joint medical surveillance measures outlined by the Department of Defense, the US Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine (USACHPPM) is beginning to assess environmental health threats to continental US military installations. A common theme in comprehensive joint medical surveillance, in support of Force Health Protection, is the identification and ass...