Student Abstracts: Environmental Science at ANL

Analysis of the current state of sediment and chemical erosion as compared to the pre-agricultural state of the Silver Creek Watershed in Green Lake County, Wisconsin. ERIN MCCANDLESS (Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48825) GUSTAVIOUS P. WILLIAMS, PH. D. (Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439) .
The EPA has become increasingly interested in watershed issues. The Silver Creek watershed in southern Wisconsin is one of the highest priority watershed restoration projects in the state. In this study 10 years worth of data for rainfall and erosion events were modeled and analyzed for sediment, erosion, and chemical content with both temporal and spatial group analysis. This watershed was studied to not only benefit its lake and streams, but also to serve as a model for future restoration projects. The results from the temporal group show that as the amount of agricultural land use increases, there is an increase for all types of erosion and an increase in the number of large-scale erosion events. The spatial analysis showed that the location of agricultural land within the watershed had no substantial influence on the sediment and nutrient loads flowing into the creek and lake. This study shows that the current agricultural practices are not adequate in preventing erosion.

Indiana Harbor Canal Dredging Project and East Chicago High School. JAMES O'SHAUGHNESSY (Harry S. Truman College, Chicago, IL 60639) GUS P. WILLIAMS (Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439) .
Education today is insufficient in teaching students basic skills in how to make informed decisions about issues that affect their daily lives. There are alternative methodologies that can address this shortfall in the traditional teaching methods, however there are significant barriers to implementing these methodologies, one of the barriers being time intensification of teaching. One alternative methodology is constructivism. This methodology involves teachers and students working together collaboratively to seek information pertaining to issues, evaluating the information for validity and forming and defending decisions based on the information. This allows for students to learn how to find and evaluate information and then make informed decisions about issues that they will face in their everyday lives. Constructivism is not, at present, widely used in classroom, but more and more curriculums should be written using this proven methodology.

Development of a Web-Based Exposure Factors Database for Use in Modeling Contaminant Uptake by Wildlife. PETIA TONTCHEVA (Wilbur Wright College, Chicago, IL 60634) IHOR HLOHOWSKYJ (Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439) .
Screening level ecological risk assessment provides a rapid but conservative analysis to determine whether a chemical waste poses significant risk to ecological resources at hazardous waste sites. Such assessment typically involves estimating chemical exposure to representative wildlife species. However, one difficulty that risk assessors often encounter is the identification of appropriate species-specific exposure factors for wildlife models. While the Environmental Protection Agency has developed a handbook of exposure factors for wildlife species common to the United States, the handbook lacks wildlife species specifically for the arid environments of North America. In order to provide more accurate and realistic exposure factors for wildlife in arid ecosystems, a database has been developed. This database identifies species-specific exposure factors such as body weight, home range, diet composition, food, water, and soil ingestion rates. Data for 28 wildlife species are obtained from a variety of peer-reviewed publications, books, and agency reports and are incorporated into the database. Additionally, the database has environmental data fields such as location, ecological region, age, sex, season, and habitat, associated with each exposure parameter. Allometric estimators are also incorporated into the database in case of absence of field or laboratory measured data. A web-based user interface has been developed using Cold Fusion@ to provide access of this database to the Internet community. Future development of this web-based tool will include the addition of more wildlife species and the improvement of user interface.