Blogs

I’ve seen this graphic from this blog going around, and while I agree that it is pretty and visually interesting, I find it mostly ineffective for communicating the magnitudes of pandemics over time. Our eyes and brains have a difficult time comparing the volume of spheres compared to a line on a bar chart. Additionally, the image is three dimensional in perspective, which further obfuscates direct comparisons. Pandemics So since I’m in quarantine, I decided to make a more basic image that allows one to compare magnitudes better. [Read More]

Sometimes in environmental regulation, we are unable to find a clear cause-effect relationship between a known stressor and a known response due to confounders. This is a common problem when attempting to determine acceptable nutrient regimes for some systems. For example, Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) was required to promulgate Numeric Nutrient Criteria for estuaries as the result of a lawsuit, yet no straightforward cause-effect relationship could be found for Total Nitrogen (TN) and/or Total Phosphorus (TP) leading to excess Chlorophyll a, which in turn lead to submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) die-off resulting in the loss of this key habitat for these highly productive systems. [Read More]

Happy 2018! I’ve rebuilt the website with the Beautiful-Hugo theme. It’s a new year, and one of my goals is to actually blog more consistently. With that in mind, here is a “better late than never” (but still later than it should be) post in which I look back and reflect on the past year. Borrowing a format I saw on The Lab and Field Blog, here is my 2017 by the numbers: [Read More]

Well, this blog entry has certainly been delayed more than I anticipated. This post will hopefully give you an introductory background into the motivations behind determining a regulatory number, the methods available to set that number, what the major assumptions are, and what the differences are between the methods. 1. What are the goals of human health criteria regulations? Human Health Criteria (HHC) water quality standards are set to ensure that a designated population can safely consume seafood, and swim and drink potable water. [Read More]

Recently in Florida, there has been some controversy over an update to Human Health Criteria (HHC) that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) promulgated concerning acceptable levels for 88 carcinogens in ambient water and seafood. Most notably, many environmental activists are concerned that historic numbers for several substances are proposed to increase. Many blame FDEP’s use of a probabilistic model instead of the previously used deterministic model, and this theme was repeated in the press: [Read More]

I finally did it. I actually made a blog. The focus of this blog will be things I am familiar with and passionate about:

• The intersection of science and policy as it relates to water.
• Exploration of the science and evidence behind controversial topics
• Cycling

I’ll likely deviate from this theme on occassion, but will try to keep the focus there.

That being said, here is some test R code so I make sure things are working alright: