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Research Programs
Quality Environmental Information
NHEERL Research Programs
EPA's goal is to provide access to information about environmental conditions and related health and ecological risks to help inform decisions and help the public assess the general environmental health of communities. Innovative tools that provide reliable, secure exchange of quality environmental information assist in this objective. NHEERL supports EPA's goal by developing and maintaining information data bases on the effects of environmental contaminants on human and ecological health.
Problem: One of EPA's goals is to provide information to the public. The Agency has committed to implement a system to deliver research results, tools and databases, manuals, guidance and technical information to internal and external users.
Scientific Questions:
- What kind of data delivery system is required to provide community-based, risk assessment and ecological toxicity data to the public;
- What tools are required to effectively communicate environmental information?
Approach: Several data bases are developed and maintained by NHEERL. These contain information that may be used for predicting potential toxicity or for developing standards such as water quality criteria for the protection of aquatic life, wildlife and terrestrial plants. The EVISTRA data base, for example, is a compilation of existing toxic effects data into a format accessible to all parts of the Agency, States, Tribes and the general public.
Recent Highlights:
- We have developed a data base for classifying chemicals by their mode of toxic action. The techniques have been codified into a system that associates chemical structure (through Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships, or QSAR) with likely modes of action in order to predict toxicity. This knowledge base provides the largest chemical data set and suite of toxicodynamic data reported to date.
- Our ecotoxicology data base, or ECOTOX, is the most comprehensive data base of toxic effects information available for aquatic and terrestrial species. It contains over 228,000 records for more than 7300 chemicals. It can be found at www.epa.gov/ecotox/.
