Assessment Endpoints in Ecological Risk Assessments - The Devil is in the Details

by Cheryl Montgomery

and

Multicriteria Decision-Analysis for Management of Contaminated Sediments

by Thomas P. Seager

With a brief introduction by President Elect Igor Linkov, ICF Consulting

Wednesday, February 11, 2004
4:05-4:30 PM Social gathering, light snacks
4:30–6:30 PM Program

Conference Room, CDM
One Cambridge Place, 50 Hampshire Street,
Cambridge, MA

RSVP Required to Korin Scheible at CDM, ScheibleKA@cdm.com by noon the day of the meeting to facilitate security sign in.

Assessment Endpoints in Ecological Risk Assessments - The Devil is in the Details

Cheryl Montgomery, President
Montgomery Associates
Arlington, MA

Summary: Correct definition of assessment endpoints during the problem formulation stage of a risk assessment is critical to the success of a risk assessment. Equally important is how amenable an assessment endpoint is to measurement. A wetlands case study will be used to illustrate how properly defined assessment endpoints can both streamline data collection, and support the risk characterization, while poorly defined assessment endpoints can result in unfocused information that makes risk characterization difficult.

Biography: Dr. Cheryl R. Montgomery is a Principal and the Owner of Montgomery & Associates, Inc., an environmental consulting firm that for the past 9 years has offered regulatory and environmental consulting services. Dr. Montgomery has 15 years of post-graduate work experience in the environmental sciences, and a Principal at Montgomery & Associates, she provides strategic planning, oversight management, coordination, and senior scientific technical support for projects in the area of hazardous waste site and pesticide risk assessments. She has been an integral part of ASTM's RBCA standard guides development for both chemical releases and for the protection of ecological resources, and she was co-chair for the RBCA Leadership Council.

Multicriteria Decision-Analysis for Management of Contaminated Sediments

Thomas P. Seager
ERG
University of New Hampshire

Summary: Environmental management decisions are rarely amenable to optimization for single criteria (such as least cost). Divergent stakeholder values, incommensurate technological choices, and uncertainty often result in problems that involve multiple, sometimes mutually exclusive goals. Multicriteria decision analysis is a method of assessing available options for selecting trade offs openly and consciously. This research hypothesizes that MCDA, when coupled with stakeholder value elicitation, can improve the quality of public participation and the environmental decision making process. An illustrative case study involving disposal of contaminated sediments from an estuarine dredging project is presented.

Biography: Dr. Thomas P Seager is a Research Engineer in the Environmental Research Group (ERG) at UNH and specializes in environmental management, industrial ecology and quantitative approaches to sustainability. Dr. Seager has taught a variety of engineering courses at several different levels including community college, undergraduate, and graduate and published several research articles in journals such as The Journal of Cleaner Production, and Resources, Conservation, and Recycling. He is currently working with experts at the UNH Center for Contaminated Sediments Research to develop a multicriteria decision support tool to assist coastal zone managers in the assessment and implementation of novel technologies for contaminated dredged sediment management. This multi-investigator, multidisciplinary project is supported by NOAA's Cooperative Center for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technologies (CICEET).