Environment - Research

Research Area #3 | Environment & Climate

Understanding the role of environmental variability and climate is a critical part of investigating, mitigating, and preventing human health impacts. Environmental variability and climate impact the severity, transport, concentration, and dispersion of pathogens, biotoxins, and toxic chemicals. Environmental variability and climate can also impact the structure or composition of biological communities and interactions with other communities or ecosystem components.


Our research goals (2004-2009) are to:

  • Identify environmental factors that contribute to variation in harmful algal blooms to develop models that support human health risk assessments.
  • Identify environmental factors that contribute to variation in pathogen incidence and distribution to develop models that support human health risk assessments.
  • Determine the risk of harmful pathogens being released into the local marine environment from ballast water and interaction with climate variability and change.

Researchers

Principal Investigators:
Dr. Edward Miles, University of Washington

Key External Collaborators:
Dr. Nate Mantua , University of Washington

 

Links

University of Washington Climate Impacts Group