Biomedical subjects

Sabine E Apitz

Publications and source records attributed to Sabine E Apitz.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Risk-based decision making to manage contaminated sediments.

This paper summarizes discussion among the 7 authors who served on an expert panel at the Third Battelle International Conference on Remediation of Contaminated Sediments held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, in January 2005. In this article, the authors review how sediment management decisions are currently made and address the question of how management decisions should be made in the future. It is arguably the case that sediment remediation presents greater challenges and more complexity than traditional land-based clean-ups. Although understanding of these challenges and complexities has grown over the last 25 y, there has been, until recently, relatively little innovation in the approaches used to manage the environmental risks posed by contaminated sediments. New methods that facilitate a more rigorous analysis of the multiple criteria considered in decision making have been developed. These methods, collectively known as multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), coupled with the use of comparative-risk assessment and cost/benefit analysis, are proposed as an effective, efficient, and credible foundation for evaluating remedy alternatives at contaminated sediment sites.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗

PubMed2006

European environmental management: moving to an ecosystem approach.

The European Union has adopted several environmental directives, strategies, recommendations, and agreements that require a shift from local- or regional-based regulations to more ecosystem-based, holistic environmental management. Over the next decade, environmental management in Europe is likely to focus more on biological and ecological conditions rather than physical and chemical conditions, with ecosystem health at the center of regulation and management decision making. Successful implementation of this new ecosystem management and strategic assessment process in Europe will require the integration of regulatory and technical information and extensive collaboration from among European Union member countries, between agencies, and across disciplines to an unprecedented degree. It will also require extensive efforts to adapt current systems of environmental assessment and management to the basin and ecosystem level, across media and habitats, and considering a much broader set of impacts on ecosystem status than is currently addressed in most risk assessments. This will require the understanding, integration, and communication of economic, ecological, hydrological, and other processes across many spatial and temporal scales. This article discusses these challenges and describes some of the research initiatives that will help achieve integrated ecosystem management in Europe.

Decision Making↗

PubMed2005

Assessing and managing contaminated sediments: part I, developing an effective investigation and risk evaluation strategy.

This is the first of a two-part review of the current state-of-the-science pertaining to the assessment and management of contaminated sediments. The goal of this review is to introduce some of the major technical and policy issues stemming from the assessment and management of contaminated sediments, highlight a number of aspects of contaminated sediment assessment and management found to be successful, and, when appropriate, address the barriers that still exist for improving contaminated sediment management. In this paper, Part I, the many key elements of an effective investigation and risk evaluation strategy are reviewed, beginning with the development of a conceptual site model (CSM) and including a discussion of some of the key factors influencing the design of sediment investigations and ecological risk assessment of sediment-bound chemicals on aquatic biota. In Part II of this paper (Apitz et al. 2005), various approaches are reviewed for evaluating sediment risk and monitoring sediment remedy effectiveness. While many of the technical and policy issues described in this review are relevant to dredged material management, the focus of this paper is on sediment assessment for environmental management.

Geologic Sediments↗

PubMed2002

Impact of irradiation and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon spiking on microbial populations in marine sediment for future aging and biodegradability studies.

Experiments were carried out to develop methods to generate well-characterized, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH)-spiked, aged but minimally altered sediments for fate, biodegradation, and bioavailability experiments. Changes in indigenous bacterial populations were monitored in mesocosms constructed of relatively clean San Diego Bay sediments, with and without exposure to gamma radiation, and then spiked with five different PAHs and hexadecane. While phenanthrene and chrysene degraders were present in the unspiked sediments and increased during handling, PAH spiking of nonirradiated sediments led to dramatic increases in their numbers. Phenotypic characterization of isolates able to grow on phenanthrene or chrysene placed them in several genera of marine bacteria: Vibrio, Marinobacter or Cycloclasticus, Pseudoalteromonas, Marinomonas, and HALOMONAS: This is the first time that marine PAH degraders have been identified as the latter two genera, expanding the diversity of marine bacteria with this ability. Even at the highest irradiation dose (10 megarads), heterotrophs and endospore formers reappeared within weeks. However, while bacteria from the unirradiated sediments had the capacity to both grow on and mineralize 14C-labeled phenanthrene and chrysene, irradiation prevented the reappearance of PAH degraders for up to 4 months, allowing spikes to age onto the sediments, which can be used to model biodegradation in marine sediments.

Biodegradation, Environmental↗