Rivers provide a special suite of goods and services valued highly by the public that are inextricably linked to their flow dynamics and the interaction of flow with the landscape. Yet most rivers are within watersheds that are stressed to some extent by human activities including development, dams, or extractive uses. Climate change will add to and magnify risks that are already present throug...

Collaboration between industry and regulators resulted in the development of a decision tree approach using in vitro or ex vivo assays to replace animal tests when determining the eye irritation potential of antimicrobial cleaning products (AMCPs) under the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Pesticide Programs' hazard classification and labeling system. A policy docum...

While governments and individuals strive to maintain the availability of high-quality water resources, many factors can "change the landscape" of water availability and quality, including drought, climate change, saltwater intrusion, aquifer depletion, population increases, and policy changes. Specialty crop producers, including nursery and greenhouse container operations, rely heavily on avail...

The current unprecedented expansion of infrastructure promises to enhance human wellbeing but risks causing substantial harm to natural ecosystems and the benefits they provide for people. A framework for systematically and proactively identifying the likely benefits and costs of such developments is badly needed. Here, we develop and test at the subregional scale a recently proposed global sch...

The recent advances in digital cameras and sensors, as well as in network bandwidth and information storage capacities, have revolutionized our ability to capture multimedia data (sounds, images, videos, etc.) for environmental monitoring and are also greatly improving our ability to effectively manage natural resources. Sensors are used increasingly in a range of monitoring or exploratory appl...

Transportation planning models are typically used to estimate future traffic patterns, peak period traffic, travel time, and various environmental or other related traffic flow characteristics. Unfortunately, traffic safety is seldom, if ever, explicitly considered proactively during the transportation planning process. This omission is attributed to various factors, including the lack of avail...

Understanding the differences in the effects of environmental contamination on children and adults is an important part of environmental policymaking; however, unless environmental health policies reflect the differences between adults and children, this knowledge will have little practical effect. The authors of this article consider how the unique vulnerabilities of children challenge environ...

This paper outlines how we are exploring ways to combine analogical reasoning, deductive knowledge integration, and intelligent information retrieval to create new power tools for intelligence analysis. We summarize efforts on two problems: (1) situation tracking—where the goal is to maintain a conceptual understanding of an ongoing situation over time, extending it with new information (often ...

Evolution is a basic fact of software life. Domain-specific agile software frameworks are key to modern enterprise information systems (EIS). We propose a model checking approach to formal verification of agile frameworks that evolve continuously. The results obtained can be used to justify the maintenance activities in software evolution and identify important but implicit assumptions about th...

The Semantic Web is about to become a rich source of knowledge whose potential will be squandered if it is not accessible for everyone. Intuitive interfaces like conversational agents are needed to better disseminate this knowledge, either on request or even proactively in a context-aware manner. This paper presents work on extending an existing conversational agent, Max, with abilities to acce...