Environmental management is a systematic approach to finding practical ways for reducing negative environmental impacts and protecting the health of the natural world, i.e., the oceans, freshwater systems, land, and atmosphere. In most cases, it does not actually involve managing the environment itself, but rather the process of taking steps and promoting behaviors that will have a positive impact on how environmental resources are used and protected based on the rules of sustainability.
Land use change is fundamental to the operations of the biosphere because alterations in the relative proportions of land dedicated to urbanization, agriculture, forests, woodlands, grasslands, and pasture affect, among others, the global water distribution, the carbon and nitrogen biogeochemical cycles, and modify the reflectance (albedo) of the Earth’s surface. Ocean circulation patterns have a strong influence on climate and weather and, in turn, the food supply of both humans and other organisms. Management of the Earth’s atmosphere involves assessment of the greenhouse gases to identify opportunities to address human-induced climate change, as well as assessment of the human impacts on air quality.
In our lab, we focus on the management of the atmospheric environment. Gaseous and particulate pollutants are emitted by numerous anthropogenic and natural sources that contribute to climate change and significantly affect human well-being and ecosystems. In addition to man-made pollution, the long-range transport of natural pollutants sporadically emitted from large natural forest fires, volcanic eruptions, and dust significantly contributes to the impairment of air quality and visibility at both local and regional scales. The evolution of air pollutants from their local sources to regions of impact is a complex, non-linear problem governed by transport processes, chemical transformations, and multiple interactions that are not fully understood today. In order to improve our knowledge and quantify the impact of atmospheric pollutants on the environment (humans and ecosystems), air quality monitoring and modeling have become a real scientific challenge. The main uncertainties in the current air quality modeling with respect to the formation, transport, and interactions of main gaseous and aerosol pollutants are: the formation of secondary organic aerosol, the interactions between aerosols and gases, and the scale interactions and long-range transport of pollutants from global to local scale.