The process of characterization is a necessary first step in any effort to determine environmental and health risks and to devise remediation and restoration strategies. Such characterization is critical at all contaminated sites, including those on lands used for DOE activities. Characterization includes many hierarchical levels, and involves physical, chemical and biological components. Characterization processes span the range from molecular to landscape scales, and significant knowledge gaps exist that impair accurate risk assessment, limit remediation and restoration activities, and often make cost-effective management decisions difficult or impossible.
While characterization includes a descriptive component, it is more than simply measuring contaminant concentrations in biota or other media, or reporting the presence or quantity of various organisms at contaminated locations. Characterization includes developing an understanding of the processes that control distributions of contaminants, their chemical speciation, and bioavailability. Characterization also includes elucidation of the environmental and ecological patterns and processes that influence organismal distributions, (micro) biological diversity and function, health, reproduction, mortality, and other factors. Characterization is necessary to construct models of the way natural and engineered systems function both in the presence and absence of environmental perturbations such as anthropogenic contamination. In other words, characterization is best viewed as an activity to better describe and understand particular habitats and systems, both pristine and contaminant-stressed. Only with this knowledge can informed decisions be made about, for example, (1) whether there is a need to restore or remediate a given site; (2) what state to restore the site to; (3) when the process is completed, and (4) how successful and cost-effective a remediation activity has been.
There are significant knowledge gaps that must be closed to achieve the types of characterization necessary to meet remediation and restoration goals. Research at SREL addresses these knowledge gaps by taking advantage of unique expertise in the environmental sciences and ecology, the unparalleled field research opportunities at the SRS, and the long-term data sets, research tools and capabilities that SREL has developed in the last half-century of studies on the SRS.
SREL researchers associated with the Characterization theme include:
