The chief of the U.S. Geographical Survey’s Lake Michigan Ecological Research Station (LMERS), headquartered at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, is scheduled to appear at a congressional briefing in Washington, D.C., on Friday on beach health.

Research ecologist Richard Whitman, whose team at LMERS has been doing cutting-edge work on E. coli testing and modeling, will brief Congress on the state-of-the-art methods and predictive models being developed by the U.S. Geographical Survey to evaluate quickly whether unsafe swimming conditions exist at a beach.

Right now beach managers tend to rely on E. coli tests which do not provide real-time assessments of health hazards. E. coli is a bacterium found in the human stomach which is used as an indicator of more harmful pathogens in swimming waters.

The briefing is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Friday in Washington. It’s being sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., and the Great Lakes Task Force. Also scheduled to appear are Deanna Archuletta, deputy assistant secretary for water and science in the U.S. Department of the Interior; Shannon Briggs Sr., toxicologist and beach coordinator for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality; and Heather Morehead, beaches coordinator for the Maryland Department of the Environment.

The Lake Michigan Ecological Research Station is part of the U.S. Geographical Survey’s Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Posted 6/18/2009