A 10-year-old girl walks to the edge of the Kansas River in Topeka, Kansas, rolls up a note, and slips it into a plastic bottle before sending it downstream. Sixteen years, hundreds of miles, and two rivers later, Michael Coyne-Logan, an educational facilitator for Living Lands and Waters, hoists it from the Mississippi River in St. Louis. That is one bottle among the millions of pounds of trash that he and his cleanup crew have collected in recent years as they try to make a dent in the enormous amount of garbage floating down the Mississippi.

The Leaf Pack Network is an international network of teachers, students, and citizen monitors investigating their local stream ecosystems. Following instructions in the Leaf Pack Network Manual, monitors use tree leaves and aquatic insects to determine the health of their stream and understand its ecology.

The threat of exposure to noxious chemicals - in the air, the land or the water - is nothing new in Louisiana. The state has ranked No. 2 in toxic emissions, behind Texas, just about every year since 1988, when the EPA began requiring industry to tally its pollution. That year, the first in which the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory was published, Louisiana's petrochemical plants acknowledged releasing nearly 1 billion pounds of hazardous wastes at their plant sites, or about 238 pounds for every person then in Louisiana.

Environmental law may be the one institution standing between us and planetary exhaustion. It is also an institution that needs to be reconciled with human liberty and economic aspirations. This course considers these issues and provides a tour though existing legal regimes governing pollution, water law, endangered species, toxic substances, environmental impact analyses, and environmental risk.

Connect with ocean experts and explore topics from corals to coastal science with our audio podcast." This episode is all about hypoxia

How's My Waterway? was designed to provide the general public with information about the condition of their local waters based on data that states, federal, tribal, local agencies and others have provided to EPA. Water quality information is displayed on 3 scales in How's My Waterway; community, state and national. More recent or more detailed water information may exist that is not yet available through EPA databases or other sources.

Oil spills are harmful to marine birds and mammals as well as fish and shellfish. Oil destroys the insulating ability of fur-bearing mammals, such as sea otters, and the water repellency of a bird's feathers, thus exposing these creatures to the harsh elements. Without the ability to repel water and insulate from the cold water, birds and mammals will die from hypothermia.

When oil is spilled into the ocean, it has some devastating effects on the ecosystem. How do we clean it up?

Phosphates are chemicals containing the element phosphorous, and they affect water quality by causing excessive growth of algae. About 3 1/2 pounds of phosphates per person enter the environment in the United States annually from farms, yards, waste water and factory waste. Phosphates in water feed algae, which grow out of control in water ecosystems and create imbalances, which destroy other life forms and produce harmful toxins.

Cyanobacteria HABs (CyHABs or CyanoHABs) typically occur in nutrient rich, warm surface water bodies and can produce potent toxins. Occurrence of CyHABs is increasing globally, and blooms are accompanied by sporadic reports of human and animal illnesses and deaths. This webinar will summarize the state of the science and describe how a One Health approach to CyHABs can inform human health risks.