Not many of us can claim three careers in one single lifetime, but that’s been a day in the life of this month’s Waterborne Living Legend: Scott Dyer. Internationally renowned and at the forefront of regulatory-based science and research, Scott has achieved acclaim for his Environmental Risk Assessment expertise and the vast experience he earned within the corporate world as a college professor and as a senior environmental consultant. A mentor to many and humble about his own achievements, Scott says, “I am most proud of the people I’ve worked with. I’ve enjoyed watching them grow as scientists, risk assessors, and communicators.”

In this month’s feature, we’ll take a look at Scott’s career and life, from iStream^® to jazz bands. According to Scott, “my work is always interesting. I enjoy learning and understanding how materials and chemicals may impact the environment.”

A native Iowan and son of an Iowa State University faculty member, it made sense that Scott’s environmental science work began at this esteemed institution. It was there that he earned first his undergraduate degree in Biology and then a Masters degree in Toxicology under the guidance of Professor Joel Coats, who helped Scott understand “how materials find their way into our environment, including their mechanisms of action and potential on the food chain.” This process inspired Scott’s M.S. Thesis “Effects of hardness and salinity on the acute toxicity and uptake of fenvalerate by bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus)”.

In 1991, Scott graduated from The University of North Texas his PhD in Biology. It was here that he was exposed to Geographic Information Systems—GIS—and had his eyes opened to, “how this technology can aid understanding spatial and temporal factors that can affect organism and aquatic communities’ health.” A grant from the United States Air Force helped him study...

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I am excited to announce that the following articles coauthored by Waterborne members have just been published in Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management as open access:

• Environmental fate of monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA)—Part 1: Conceptual model
• Environmental fate of monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA)—Part 2: Modeling sequestration and transformation 

One of my favorite quotes is from Max Planck, the German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 by his discovery of energy quanta.

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

MSMA is a selective contact herbicide that has been proven to provide effective control of a wide range of problematic weeds in cotton, turf, and rights-of-way. It has also proven to be among the most interesting and challenging chemicals I have worked on in my career given its behavior in the environment.

The complexities of MSMA and the challenges in analytical procedures have led scientists to false conclusions...

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What waterways contribute to over 50 percent of downstream river systems but are no longer covered by the Clean Water Act? Dry for much of the year and only forming after weather events such as rainfall or snowmelt, ephemeral streams have only recently been studied by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst modeled over 20 million rivers, lakes, and reservoirs to determine their pollution impact. 

Their discovery was astonishing: 55 percent of river system water discharged into oceans originated in ephemeral streams. That number increased to an average of 79 percent the western part of the United States with discharge from the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, and Humboldt County, California rising to 94 percent.

The U.S. Supreme Court excused ephemeral streams from the Clean Water Act in 2023’s Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency by ruling that protected water bodies would include “only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water forming geographical features that are described in ordinary parlance as streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes.” This ruling left the majority of U.S. riverways susceptible to unregulated pollution brought to them through ephemeral streams. 

Join Waterborne Environmental at the upcoming ACS Fall 2024: Elevating Chemistry conference from August 18th-22nd in Denver, Colorado! We're sending experts who will present short courses and papers (abstracts below), and meet with colleagues within the industry. See a complete list of Waterborne's ACS Fall 2024 abstracts, here.