Mike Galvin’s research while affiliated with United States Environmental Protection Agency and other places

In 2019, EPA and its partners in NASA, NOAA, and USGS launched the Cyanobacteria Assessment Network mobile application (CyAN app). The app runs on mobile devices that use the Android operating system and it uses satellite data to provide users with information about cyanobacteria concentrations in thousands of U.S. water bodies as a way of helping people be aware of, and possibly avoid, harmful cyanobacteria blooms (HCBs). In summer 2021, a web-based version of the app will be available for desktop computers or any mobile operating system, called CyANWeb. Since the app was launched, it has been downloaded thousands of times and is in use across the country helping people get a better idea about the risk of encountering HCBs at their local beaches. CyANWeb is designed to be easy to use on phones, tablets and PCs through browsers, so people can check on nearby waters. This makes the CyANWeb very local and community focused in its use.

The Piscine Stream Community Estimation System (PiSCES) provides users with a hypothesized fish community for any stream reach in the conterminous United States using information obtained from Nature Serve, the US Geological Survey (USGS), StreamCat, and the Peterson Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of North America for over 1000 native and non-native freshwater fish species. PiSCES can filter HUC8-based fish assemblages based on species-specific occurrence models; create a community abundance/biomass distribution by relating relative abundance to mean body weight of each species; and allow users to query its database to see ancillary characteristics of each species (e.g., habitat preferences and maximum size). Future efforts will aim to improve the accuracy of the species distribution database and refine/augment increase the occurrence models. The PiSCES tool is accessible at the EPA's Quantitative Environmental Domain (QED) website at https://qed.epacdx.net/pisces/

Safe and clean water is necessary for human and ecosystem health and economic growth. Over the last 40 years, water quality in the United States has improved, but threats to water quality remain. One issue that continues is the occurrence of cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms, or cyanoHABs. Health advisories and closure of recreational areas are often due to cyanoHAB events in our lakes and reservoirs. CyanoHABs can produce toxins but they also cause nuisance odors, and hypoxia. They are also visually noticeable by their unappealing surface scums. CyanoHABs negatively impact drinking water and can increase drinking water treatment costs for communities. They also impact the local economy, via revenue loss from recreation and businesses that rely on safe and clean water. Most cyanoHAB events are dealt with reactively, after the bloom has occurred in a response to the visual, odor, or toxin confirmation. What if we could proactively monitor and detect early development of cyanobacteria harmful algal blooms?

Safe and clean water is necessary for human and ecosystem health and economic growth. Over the last 40 years, water quality in the United States has improved, but threats to water quality remain. One issue that continues is the occurrence of cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms, or cyanoHABs. Health advisories and closure of recreational areas are often due to cyanoHAB events in our lakes and reservoirs. CyanoHABs can produce toxins but they also cause nuisance odors, and hypoxia. They are also visually noticeable by their unappealing surface scums. CyanoHABs negatively impact drinking water and can increase drinking water treatment costs for communities. They also impact the local economy, via revenue loss from recreation and businesses that rely on safe and clean water. Most cyanoHAB events are dealt with reactively, after the bloom has occurred in a response to the visual, odor, or toxin confirmation. What if we could proactively monitor and detect early development of cyanobacteria harmful algal blooms?

The Piscine Stream Community Estimation System (PiSCES) provides users with a plausible fish community for any stream reach in the conterminous United States. The web application uses information from Nature Serve, the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the Peterson Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of North America for over 1,000 native and non-native freshwater fish species. PiSCES can filter potential fish assemblages based on species rarity and/or genera-specific occurrence envelopes for a variety of physicochemical stream properties; create a community abundance/biomass distribution by relating relative abundance to mean body weight of each species; and allow users to query its database to see ancillary characteristics of each species (e.g., habitat preferences and maximum size). Future efforts will aim to improve the accuracy of the species distribution database. The PiSCES tool is accessible at qed.epa.gov/pisces/

Cyanobacteria and associated harmful algal blooms cause significant social, economic, and environmental impacts. Cyanobacteria synthesize hepatotoxins, neurotoxins, and dermatotoxins, affecting the health of humans and other species. The Cyanobacteria Assessment Network (CyAN) aims to inform the public and researchers about cyanobacteria by processing remote sensing imagery to provide estimates of freshwater cyanobacteria concentrations.

Background/Question/Methods -- What species of fish might someone find in a local stream? How might that community change as a result of changes to characteristics of the stream and its watershed? PiSCES is a browser-based toolkit developed to predict a fish community for any NHD-Plus stream reach in the conterminous United States. The tool uses HUC-based distributional information for over 1,000 native and non-native fish species obtained from NatureServe, the USGS, and the Peterson Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of North America. Occurrence envelopes, which define a range of conditions over which a species is most likely found, were developed based on statistical analysis of geographically diverse fish sampling information, and used to add refinement to community predictions beyond distributional polygons. Results/Conclusions -- In addition to using current geographic distributions, the PiSCES tool predicts communities that reflect information on species rarity, stream size preferences, and occurrence envelopes for water quality metrics (pH, conductivity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen) and stream characteristics (drainage area, mean width, mean depth and slope). It can also create an abundance distribution for a predicted fish community based on maximum body sizes of community members. PiSCES is one component in an array of web-based services and science modules housed within the EPA QED (quantitative environmental domain), which is currently under development. PiSCES has been used to produce initial fish communities as input for bioaccumulation modeling within an integrated environmental modeling system.

We demonstrate a novel, spatially explicit assessment of the current condition of aquatic ecosystem services, with limited sensitivity analysis for the atmospheric contaminant mercury. The Integrated Ecological Modeling System (IEMS) forecasts water quality and quantity, habitat suitability for aquatic biota, fish biomasses, population densities, productivities, and contamination by methylmercury across headwater watersheds. We applied this IEMS to the Coal River Basin (CRB), West Virginia (USA), an 8-digit hydrologic unit watershed, by simulating a network of 97 stream segments using the SWAT watershed model, a watershed mercury loading model, the WASP water quality model, the PiSCES fish community estimation model, a fish habitat suitability model, the BASS fish community and bioaccumulation model, and an ecoservices post-processer. Model application was facilitated by automated data retrieval and model setup and updated model wrappers and interfaces for data transfers between these models from a prior study. This companion study evaluates baseline predictions of ecoservices provided for 1990–2010 for the population of streams in the CRB and serves as a foundation for future model development.

Watershed and Economic Data InterOperability (WEDO) is a system of information technologies designed to publish watershed modeling studies for reuse. WEDO facilitates three aspects of interoperability: discovery, evaluation and integration of data. This increased level of interoperability goes beyond the current practice of publishing modeling studies as reports or journal articles. Rather than summarized results, modeling studies can be published with their full complement of input data, calibration parameters and output with associated metadata for easy duplication by others. Simulation calibration parameters for a model study are a boon for modelers as these parameters are often costly in terms of time and computational resources to determine. Reproducible science is possible only if researchers can find, evaluate and use complete modeling studies performed by other modelers. WEDO greatly increases transparency by making detailed data available to the scientific community. WEDO is a next generation technology, a Web Service linked to the EPA’s EnviroAtlas for discovery of modeling studies nationwide. Streams and rivers are identified using the National Hydrography Dataset network and stream IDs. Streams with modeling studies available are color coded in the EnviroAtlas. One can select streams within a watershed of interest to readily find data available via WEDO. The WEDO website is linked from the EnviroAtlas to provide a thorough review of each modeling study. WEDO currently provides modeled flow and water quality time series, designed for a broad range of watershed and economic models for nutrient trading market analysis. Modeling studies are packaged for download and easy integration into work flows and to reproduce results. EPA developed WEDO for anyone interested in publishing watershed modeling studies for wide dissemination and reuse. EPA’s STOrage and RETrieval (STORET)1 and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Information System (NWIS)2 are examples of nationwide repositories for sharing monitoring data on water resources. However, no such system exists for modeling studies. We provide a number of step-by-step examples of discovery and publishing in this guide. WEDO addresses public-access requirements for storing and publishing modeled data. The vision for WEDO is a flexible repository for those interested in locating modeling studies and economic data necessary to evaluate the feasibility for nutrient trading in a watershed or river basin of interest—without having to know where to locate the information from various reports and academic literature.

Interoperable software development uses principles of component reuse, systems integration, flexible data transfer, and standardized ontological documentation to promote access, reuse, and integration of code. While interoperability principles are increasingly considered technology standards in software engineering, adoption by the environmental modeling community has been slow. We created an Application Programming Interface (API) for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Human Well-being Index (HWBI) model based on interoperability principles. The HWBI characterizes economic, social, and environmental services during years 2000-2010. For each county in the U.S., specific metrics (e.g., life expectancy, housing affordability, voter turnout) are used to calculate scores for eight domains of well-being: Connection to Nature, Cultural Fulfillment, Education, Health, Leisure Time, Living Standards, Safety and Security, and Social Cohesion. These eight domain values are then used to determine an overall HWBI classification for each U.S. county, state, and region. Interoperability best-practices are demonstrated through the reuse of the code and database for both a web application and a desktop application. The web application accesses the HWBI API services with a browser-based interface to encourage data exploration and obtain feedback from the public. Desktop access is enabled via a plug-in for an agent-based modeling system that uses the HWBI API for output calculations. Our software incorporates best-practices for front and back-end design that includes automated code testing, data transfer standardization for efficiency and responsiveness, emerging documentation standards, and terminology services and controlled vocabularies to promote reusability.