MARCH 3, 2015--Drs. Adriana C. Bejarano and Alan Mearns are pleased to announce that a new paper, Improving Environmental Assessments by Integrating Species Sensitivity Distributions into Environmental Modeling: Examples with two hypothetical oil spills, is in press this week and available online at the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

The paper describes how the authors combined oil fate and transport modeling with dispersed oil Species Sensitivity Distributions (SSDs) to visualize time and space scales of potential toxicity to entrained water column organisms from dispersed oil operations, including comparison with shoreline oiling reduction associated with dispersant use. The authors drew upon two past hypothetical scenarios, a spill of 5000 barrels of crude oil off San Francisco and a spill of 5000 barrels off Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Both scenarios were originally developed for inspiring participants at ecological risk assessment workshops. The authors mathematically intersected SSD's, developed by Dr. Bejarano as part of a grant from the Coastal Response Research Center (CRRC), with concentrations of dispersed oil produced using the General NOAA Ocean Modeling Environment (GNOME), allowing examination of the proportions of species that might be affected as well as the potential spatial scale of impacts. The ultimate goal of this research was to develop a quantitative methodology to support net environmental benefit comparisons of oil spill response options.

For further information, contact Alan.Mearns@noaa.gov.

Available at: www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/aip/0025326X

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