Bisphenol A exposure, effects, and policy: A wildlife perspective

Understanding how water and solutes enter and propagate through freshwater landscapes in the Anthropocene is critical to protecting and restoring aquatic ecosystems and ensuring human water security. However, high hydrochemical variability in headwater streams, where most carbon and nutrients enter river networks, has hindered effective modelling and management. We developed an analytical framework informed by landscape ecology and catchment hydrology to quantify spatiotemporal variability across scales, which we tested in 56 headwater catchments, sampled periodically over 12 years in western France. Unexpectedly, temporal variability in dissolved carbon, nutrients and major ions was preserved moving downstream and spatial patterns of water chemistry were stable on annual to decadal timescales, partly because of synchronous variation in solute concentrations. These findings suggest that while concentration and flux cannot be extrapolated among subcatchments, periodic sampling of headwaters provides valuable information about solute sources and subcatchment resilience to disturbance.

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Unexpected spatial stability of water chemistry in headwater stream networks.

Interaction between institutional change and technological change poses important constraints on transitions of urban water systems to a state that can meet future needs. Research on urban water and other technology-dependent systems provides insights that are valuable to technology researchers interested in assuring that their efforts will have an impact. In the context of research on institutional change, innovation is the development, application, diffusion, and utilization of new knowledge and technology. This definition is intentionally inclusive: technological innovation will play a key role in reinvention of urban water systems, but is only part of what is necessary. Innovation usually depends on context, such that major changes to infrastructure include not only the technological inventions that drive greater efficiencies and physical transformations of water treatment and delivery systems, but also the political, cultural, social, and economic factors that hinder and enable such changes....

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The Innovation Deficit in Urban Water: The Need for an Integrated Perspective on Institutions, Organizations, and Technology

https://hal-univ-rennes1.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01686773/document

Trends and seasonality of river nutrients in agricultural catchments: 18 years of weekly citizen science in France

Scholars embrace multilevel governance as an analytical framework for complex problems, such as climate change or water pollution. However, the elements needed to comprehensively operationalize mul...

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Multilevel Governance: Framing the Integration of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Policymaking

The Clean Water Act is at a critical juncture today. New policies, new approaches may soon be adopted before we have had an adequate opportunity to assess how well the old techniques have worked. We need to determine as accurately as possible what has worked and what has failed as we approach the question of change. Although the Act stands in need of revision to fill various gaps in coverage, the aspects of the Act that are prime candidates for reform are not always the ones the critics target. The CWA, in fact, has been remarkably successful in doing what it was designed to do. The application of technology-based effluent limitations through the permit system has proven to have been a wise approach for the initial control of point sources. Together with the funding of thousands of municipal wastewater treatment facilities, the technology-based approach has produced remarkable reductions in both municipal and industrial pollution. The CWA has proven successful in other ways as well. The rate at which wetlands are lost has declined some 90 percent since the early 1970s, and the amount of oil spilled annually into our waters has fallen to one-tenth of the level that prevailed during the 1970s. All of this was done without causing harm to the economy or to our international competitiveness. In fact, the cost of complying with the Act has been lower than the EPA anticipated, and eleven of our largest trading partners actually spend more per capita on controlling water pollution than we do. The economic benefits produced by the Act, moreover, appear greater than many had assumed. The Act and its success stand as a testament to the vision, insight, and courage of its drafters. Unfortunately, but not suprisingly given the limits of human and political capacity, neither the design nor its implementation have been perfect.

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Water Quality Today - Has the Clean Water Act Been a Success?

Proposed lie-detection technology based on neuroscience poses significant challenges for the law. The law must respond to the science with an adequate understanding of such evidence, its significance, and its limitations. This paper makes three contributions toward those ends. First, it provides an account of the preliminary neuroscience research underlying this proposed evidence. Second, it discusses the nature and significance of such evidence, how such evidence would fit with legal practices and concepts, and its potential admissibility. Finally, it analyzes the constitutional protections that may limit the compelled production of such evidence.

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Neuroscience Evidence, Legal Culture, and Criminal Procedure

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Daniel M. Filler

Papers

Water Quality Today - Has the Clean Water Act Been a Success?

Neuroscience Evidence, Legal Culture, and Criminal Procedure

The Evolution of Water Pollution Control in the United States - State, Local, and Federal Efforts, 1789-1972: Part II