Environmental Information Management | Page 5 of 35

Applications, EHS Compliance, Environmental Information Management, Greenhouse Gases (GHG), Multitenancy, Sustainability

Emerging Technology and the Environmental Industry

Locus Founder and CEO, Neno Duplan recently sat down with Grant Ferrier of Environmental Business International to discuss a myriad of topics relating to technology in the environmental industry such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Multi-tenancy, IoT, and much more.

[icoLocus name=”list”] Use the video chapters to navigate to areas of interest.

Neno Duplan is founder and CEO of Locus Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based environmental software company founded in 1997. Locus evolved from his work as a research associate at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, where he developed the first prototype system for environmental information management. This early work led to the development of numerous databases at some of the nation’s largest environmental sites, and ultimately, to the formation of Locus in 1997.

Click here to learn more and purchase the full EBJ Vol XXXIII No 5&6: Environmental Industry Outlook 2020-2021

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June 25, 2021

Water Quality in the Cloud with Neno Duplan

Locus Technologies founder and CEO Neno Duplan provides a wealth of experience on water quality in the cloud. Neno began cloud-based data work before any of us knew what the cloud even was. He does a great job explaining the steps needed to undertake and the significant benefits of a cloud-based digital transformation, and much more!

June 23, 2021

Applications, EHS Compliance, Environmental Information Management, ESG, Sustainability

Adapting to New ESG Roles and Responsibilities

A recent trend in business has been the emergence of new professional roles and responsibilities created to meet the ever-growing and ever-changing ESG landscape. A growth in commitment from proactive organizations towards heightened ESG standards means that many professionals have seen their duties not only increase, but they have been made more diverse than before. Given there is no precedent for combined ESG roles in the workplace, professionals from a range of backgrounds are stepping up to fill the necessary roles for their organizations. As a result, the environmental side of ESG is new to many.

Whether your background is in financial compliance or in human resources, the expansion of your responsibilities means more information to manage and report. To help with this increased workload, you are first going to need assistance with environmental and sustainability monitoring and reporting, so that you can make data-driven decisions for the betterment of your company and its extended community. This undertaking may seem daunting, diving headfirst into a new area of expertise, luckily there is a software designed by and for environmental professionals.

While interest has surged in environmental, social, and corporate governance in recent years, we have been committed to simplifying environmental compliance and management for 25 years. We believe that environmental and sustainability data management, which is qualitative and indisputable, is the backbone of a strong ESG program. For new ESG leaders, this is the first tool that you should put into your toolkit and is the one you should build your program around.

Making the foray into ESG means utilizing software to track environmental data for energy use, water consumption, air emissions, and waste generation to name a few. The platforms we have developed over two decades are transparent and cover processes from start to finish, allowing for evidence-based ESG reporting and decision-making. Our ESG software suite allows you to centralize your data and automate its collection, providing built-in auditing features and custom calculators to match the needs of your organization. Locus removes the guesswork from environmental data management and reporting, and will provide strength to your early ESG reports.

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June 21, 2021

Applications, Cloud / SaaS, Environmental Information Management

Top 5 Usability Features in Locus EIM

Locus Environmental Information Management (EIM) is the leading cloud-based application for managing and reporting environmental data. EIM allows users to gain control and insights into any analytical data, automate laboratory and field data collection, and ditch the patchwork of paper forms, spreadsheets, and disjointed databases for a centralized system. We have highlighted 5 key usability features that allow users to get the most out of their investment.

Easy Searching

Throughout EIM, users have many opportunities to create search criteria, then pull up the records that match their data filters. A recent addition to EIM has been well received as it is a game-changer for simplicity. Located to the right of the main menu is a search box. Type in the name of a parameter, then click the resulting View Parameter link. You will see all the relevant information on the parameter, including parameter type, whether it is an aggregate parameter or not, site assignment, molecular weight, toxicity equivalence factor, and so forth. Click the View Matching Field Sample Results link, and you will see all the lab results that are stored in EIM for your selected site and analyte. If the parameter is a field measurement, you will see all applicable field measurements. If a parameter can be either a field measurement or lab analyte, you will see both field readings and laboratory results for the parameter.

Suppose your entry in the search box is a sampling location rather than the name of a parameter. In that case, you will see matching field measurements, sample collection data, analytical results, and groundwater readings for the indicated location.

Rolling Upgrades

Think of the frustration your users or administrators may have experienced graduating from Windows XP to Windows 7 and 8 then 10. We guarantee this will not be repeated with our suite of products. Our Software has no version numbers. Rolling upgrades (included in License) are performed for brief periods during non-standard working hours. These updates will not hide or bury existing features. Over time, the interface may change to take advantage of new tools, but this will be done in a measured manner to improve the user experience. What we strive for is to never have a formerly working function break. If you have a recent vintage browser, you should have access to all functionality that comes with our Software both before and after a release.

In line with this advantage of our products, Locus is not dependent on maintaining links to other software packages. This is not the case for some of our competitors who rely on links to third-party packages to perform data validation, plotting, and reporting.

User Empowerment

Almost all of the tasks that are required to manage our products can be done by our customers. This includes adding new users, permissions, and roles; new valid values; new action limits and screening criteria; new custom reports; editing or deleting groups of records; adding new tables to audit; and creating new EDD formats. The few tasks that Locus must be involved include rollbacks of the database, adding new custom fields and data checks, and developing new functionalities.

Customers who adopt EIM typically replace a series of spreadsheets that have grown more unwieldy by the year or a homegrown database built with a lower-end product like Access. The keepers or administrators of these spreadsheets and homegrown databases are sometimes concerned about losing access and control. There is no doubt that a cloud-based system that multiple clients access must have rigid controls in place to assure data integrity and completeness. Still, we go to great lengths to accommodate “power users,” allowing them to run their SQL statements in our Custom Query module. This tool is widely used and appreciated by users who formerly managed in-house databases at DOE facilities, large water utilities, environmental consultancies, and leading oil and chemical companies. Finally, and most importantly, Locus is a partner with our customers; if you are not successful with EIM, no one “wins.”

Interface Consistency and Simplicity: EIM Grids

The basic grid that EIM uses to display data is pervasive throughout the system, appearing in multiple places under each of the Setup, Field, Input, Analysis, Reporting, and Visualization main menu options. This grid is mighty. With it, you can filter on individual columns by clicking on a list of values below the column header. You can also sort the values in any column by clicking on an up or down arrow in the column header. You can choose to display 10–1000 records at a time. Other features include an advanced search option, the ability to reorder/select/deselect columns, and the opportunity to export the data displayed in the grid using any of the following export types – CSV, Delimited, Excel, PDF, KMZ, Shapefile, or XML – or you can copy the dataset to your clipboard. The power and ease of use of this grid, coupled with its presence throughout EIM, make the system easy to learn and use for users of all ability levels.

The usability of the grid is taken to a new level in several places in EIM, where you pull up a set of analytical records that meet the selection criteria that you have specified. When you then click on the map icon in the bottom left corner of the grid, EIM takes you directly to Locus’ GIS module, where the results pulled up on the grid are displayed on a map of your site next to their sampling locations.

Saving and Reusing Your Work

While you can often get to the data you need in EIM in a few steps, this is not always the case. Your selection criteria may be complicated, involving multiple fields and entries in the database. Most grids have a default set of fields that are displayed in a predetermined order. You may prefer to reorder these, include additional fields, or remove some of the default selections. If you need a highly formatted instead of a simple tabular report that does not yet exist in EIM, you will need to spend more time inputting the specifications for the report. How can you minimize your effort? You can do so by naming and then saving your selections for repeated use at later times. When you do so, you must tell EIM whether these saved inputs are for private or public use. This feature of EIM saves time, reduces keystrokes, and prevents mistakes (get it right once, then reuse as needed). And, enhances user adoption as power users can create and share the reports their users need most often.

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June 16, 2021

Data Validation, Environmental Information Management

Quicker Data Searching with Natural Language Processing

The recent year of lockdowns pushed many daily activities into the virtual world. Work, school, commerce, the arts, and even medicine have moved online and into the cloud. As a result, considerably more resources and information are now available from an internet browser or from an application on a handheld device. To navigate through all this content and make sense of it, you need the ability to quickly search and get results that are most relevant to your needs.

You can think of the web as a big database in the cloud. Traditionally, database searches were done using a precise syntax with a standard set of keywords and rules, and it can be hard for non-specialists to perform such searches without learning programming languages. Instead, you want to search in as natural a matter as possible. For example, if you want to find pizza shops with 15 miles of your house that offer delivery, you don’t want to write some fancy statement like “return pizza_shop_name where (distance to pizza shop from my house < 15 miles) and (offers_delivery is true). You just want to type “what pizza shops within 15 miles of my house offer delivery?” How can this be done?

Enter the search engine. While online search engines appeared as early as 1990, it wasn’t until Yahoo! Search appeared in 1995 that their usage became widespread. Other engines such as Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves, and Excite soon followed, though not all of them survived. In 1998, Google hit the internet, and it is now the most dominant engine in use. Other popular engines today are Bing, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo.

Current search engines compare your search terms to proprietary indexes of web page and their content. Algorithms are used to determine the most relevant parts of the search terms and how the results are ranked on the page. Your search success depends on what search terms you enter (and what terms you don’t enter). For example, it is better to search on ‘pizza nearby delivery’ than ‘what pizza shops that deliver are near my house’, as the first search uses less terms and thus more effectively narrows the results.

Search engines also support the use of symbols (such as hyphens, colons, quote marks) and commands (such as ‘related’, ‘site’, or ‘link’) that support advanced searches for finding exact word matches, excluding certain results, or limiting your search to certain sites. To expand on the pizza example, support you wanted to search for nearby pizza shops, but you don’t want to include Nogud Pizza Joints because they always put pineapple on your pizza. You would need to enter ‘pizza nearby delivery -nogud’. In some ways, with the need to know special syntax, searching is back where it was in the old database days!

Search engines are also a key part of ‘digital personal assistants’, or programs that not only perform searches but also perform simple tasks. An assistant on your phone might call the closest pizza shop so you can place an order, or perhaps even login to your loyalty app and place the order for you. There is a dizzying array of such assistants used within various devices and applications, and they all seem to have soothing names such as Siri, Alexa, Erica, and Bixby. Many of these assistants support voice activation, which just reinforces the need for natural searches. You don’t want to have to say “pizza nearby delivery minus nogud”! You just want to say “call the nearest pizza shop that does delivery, but don’t call Nogud Pizza”.

Search engine and digital personal assistant developers are working towards supporting such “natural” requests by implementing “natural language processing”. Using natural language processing, you can use full sentences with common words instead of having to remember keywords or symbols. It’s like having a conversation as opposed to doing programming. Natural language is more intuitive and can help users with poor search strategies to have more successful searches.

Furthermore, some engines and assistants have artificial intelligence (AI) built in to help guide the user if the search is not clear or if the results need further refinement. What if the closest pizza shop that does delivery is closed? Or what if a slightly farther pizza place is running a two-for-one special on your favorite pizza? The built-in AI could suggest choices to you based on your search parameters combined with your past pizza purchasing history, which would be available based on your phone call or credit charge history.

Searching in Locus EIM

The Locus team recently expanded the functionality of the EIM (Environmental Information Management) search bar to support different types of data searches. If a search term fits several search types, all are returned for the user to review.

Functionality searches: entering a word that appears in a menu or function name will return any matching menu items and functions. For example, searching for ‘regulatory exports’ returns several menu items for creating, managing, and exporting regulatory datasets.
Help searches: entering a word or phrase that appears in the EIM help files will return any matching help pages. For example, ‘print a COC’ returns help pages with that exact phrase.
Data searches: entering a location, parameter, field parameter, or field sample will return any matching data records linked with that entity. For example, searching for the parameter ‘tritium’ returns linked pages showing parameter information and all field sample results for that parameter. Searching for the location ‘MW-1’ returns linked pages showing all field samples, groundwater levels, field measurements, and field sample results at the location.

EIM lets the user perform successful searches through various methods. In all searches, the user does not need to specify if the search term is a menu item, help page, or data entity such as parameter or location. Rather, the search bar determines the most relevant results based on the data currently in EIM. Furthermore, the search bar remembers what users searched for before, and then ranks the results based on that history. If a user always goes to a page of groundwater levels when searching for location ‘MW-1’, then that page will be returned first in the list of results. Also, the EIM search bar supports common synonyms. For example, searches for ‘plot’, ‘chart’, and ‘graph’ all return results for EIM’s charting package.

By implementing the assistance methods described above, Locus is working to make searching as easy as possible. As part of that effort, Locus is working to add natural language processing into EIM searches. The goal is to let users conduct searches such as ‘what wells at my site have benzene exceedances’ or perform tasks such as ‘make a chart of benzene results’ without having to know special commands or query languages.’

How would this be done? Let’s set aside for now the issues of speech recognition – sadly, you won’t be talking to EIM soon! Assume your search query is ‘what is the maximum lead result for well 1A?’

First, EIM extracts key terms and modifiers (this is called entity recognition). EIM would extract ‘maximum’, ‘lead’, ‘result’, ‘well’, and ‘1A’, while ignoring connecting words such as ‘the’ or ‘for’.
Then, EIM categorizes these terms. EIM would be ‘trained’ via AI to know ‘lead’ is mostly used in environmental data as a noun for the chemical parameter, and not a verb. ‘Result’ refers to a lab result, and ‘well’ is a standard sampling location type.
EIM then runs a simple query and gets the maximum lead result for location 1A.
Finally, EIM puts the answer into a sentence (‘The maximum lead result at location 1A is 300 mg/L on 1/1/2020’) with any other information deemed useful, such as the units and the date.

A similar process could be done for tasks such as ‘make a chart of xylene results’. In this case, however, there is too much ambiguity to proceed, so EIM would need to return queries for additional clarifications to help guide the user to the desired result. Should the chart show all dates, or just a certain date range? How are non-detects handled? Which locations should be shown on the chart? What if the database stores separate results for o-Xylene, m,p-Xylene, plus Xylene (total)? Once all questions were answered, EIM could generate a chart and return it to the user.

Natural language is the key to helping users construct effective searches for data, whether in EIM, on a phone, or in the internet. Locus continues to improve EIM by bringing natural language processing to the EIM search engine.

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About the Author—Dr. Todd Pierce, Locus Technologies

Dr. Pierce manages a team of programmers tasked with development and implementation of Locus’ EIM application, which lets users manage their environmental data in the cloud using Software-as-a-Service technology. Dr. Pierce is also directly responsible for research and development of Locus’ GIS (geographic information systems) and visualization tools for mapping analytical and subsurface data. Dr. Pierce earned his GIS Professional (GISP) certification in 2010.

May 11, 2021

Drinking Water Quality, Environmental Information Management, Infographic

Streamline and Simplify Annual CCR Preparation

Locus water quality software is designed for water system owners and operators to simplify the sampling, management, tracking, and regulatory reporting of drinking water data. The built-in CCR module streamlines a complex and often tedious process of preparing the annual calculations required for the report, which is a win-win for the water systems and consumers.

Locus CCR Prep | Consumer Confidence Reports

Contact us to see a demo of the Drinking Water app

April 28, 2021

Applications, Drinking Water Quality, Environmental Information Management

Microplastics in the Environment

Humankind has produced hundreds of millions of tons of plastics since the 1950s. A relatively small proportion of these plastics (less than 10%) has been recycled; some has been incinerated; and a significant amount has been entombed in landfills. A small, but significant proportion of those plastics end up as microplastics (plastic particles less than 5 microns in size). Experts estimate that as many as 1.5 million tons of microplastics are released to surface water (oceans, rivers, lakes) every year. These particles don’t readily break down in the environment—which means they accumulate in the water.

So what does that mean? If even half of the microplastics that entered the waters over the last 10 years are still there, and they are evenly distributed across all the water on Earth, it means that every liter of water on the planet has over 500 tiny pieces of plastic floating around in it.

Of course, the plastic isn’t evenly distributed—we haven’t contaminated the deep oceans to the same extent we’ve contaminated rivers, lakes and other surface waters, from which we draw our drinking water. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently reported that studies of drinking water show it contains up to 1000 particles/L. WHO showed that the two most common plastic particle were PET (polyethylene terephthalate), commonly found in clothing and food containers, and polypropylene (bags, packaging and some fibers).

People don’t know how bad these are. General consensus among experts is it depends on the type of plastics: polyethylene is probably not bad, phthalates are worse, and chlorinated compounds such as vinyl chloride are far worse.

Regulators are starting to take notice: REACH in EU and CA both have proposed regulations for microplastics in drinking water. The REACH regulations attack the problem at the source. They include measurement of microplastics that are shed from clothing and fibers, which are the source of up to 35% of the microplastics in the environment. California will likely start with a preliminary guideline to help water suppliers measure and assess the microplastics in their systems.

As a drinking water supplier, you need to be prepare to manage microplastics. A good first step is having a flexible software system such as Locus, in place to track microplastics. The system should track the sampling and lab methodology as well as the data results, so you can continue not just to track your data, but assess its meaning in the face of evolving regulations and methodologies.

As a consumer of water, begin by cutting down on plastics usage. Wear cotton or other apparel which doesn’t include synthetics.

[sc_image width=”150″ height=”150″ src=”23376″ style=”11″ position=”centered” disable_lightbox=”1″ alt=”Steve Paff”]

About the Author—Steve Paff, Locus Technologies

Steve Paff is a Sales Engineer, Product Manager and Implementation specialist with over 25-years’ experience delivering quality software solutions for environmental, health, safety and sustainability. Mr. Paff has extensive experience in many of the industry’s software suites. He came to Locus as Senior Sales Engineer after developing and launching a Covid-19 contact tracing app and developing an app to track sustainability metrics across the global apparel supply chain.

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April 23, 2021

Drinking Water Quality, Environmental Information Management, Infographic, Water Utilities

How to Prepare for EPA’s Latest UCMR 5 Guidelines

Attention all water providers: the EPA’s UCMR 5 list includes 30 contaminants (29 PFAS and lithium) that both small and large water systems have to test for and report. Can your current environmental solution handle it?

Locus EIM environmental software can handle new chemicals and analyses seamlessly. Both the standard Locus EIM configuration and the Locus EIM Water configuration (specially tailored to water utilities) are built with ever-changing regulations in mind.

We’ve put together some helpful background and tips for water providers preparing for UCMR 5 monitoring.

What water providers need to know

The fifth and latest list (UCMR 5) was published on March 11, 2021, and includes 30 new chemical contaminants that must be monitored between 2023 and 2025 using specified analytical methods.
SDWA now requires that UCMR include all large PWSs (serving >10,000 people), all PWSs serving between 3,300 and 10,000 people, and a representative sample of PWSs serving fewer than 3,300 people.
Large systems must pay for their own testing, and US EPA will pay for analytical costs for small systems.
Labs must receive EPA UCMR approval to conduct analyses on UCMR 5 contaminants.

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What’s the UCMR and why are some contaminants unregulated?

In 1996, Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act with the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR). Under this new rule, US EPA can require water providers to monitor and collect data for contaminants that may be in drinking water but don’t have any health-based standards set (yet) under the SDWA.

More than 150,000 public water systems are subject to the SDWA regulations. US EPA, states, tribes, water systems, and the public all work together to protect the water supply from an ever-growing list of contaminants.

However, under the UCMR, US EPA is restricted to issuing a new list every five years of no more than 30 unregulated contaminants to be monitored by water providers.

This helps reduce the burden on water providers, since monitoring and testing for the existing long list of regulated contaminants already requires a significant investment of time and resources.

Throughout the course of this monitoring, US EPA can determine whether the contaminants need to be officially enforced— but this would require regulatory action, routed through the normal legislative process.

Tips for managing UCMR in

DO use EIM’s Sample Planning module to set your sample collection schedule ahead of time, as requirements vary and are on specific schedules
DO take advantage of EIM’s sample program features to track and manage UCMR data, or consider using a dedicated location group to track results, keeping them separate and easy to find for CCR reporting.
DON’T worry about adding in new analytical parameters in advance. With EIM’s EDD loader, you can automatically add them when the data arrive from the laboratory.

Contact your Locus Account Manager for help setting up your EIM database in advance of your sampling schedule, and we’ll make sure you’re equipped for UCMR 5!

Not yet a customer? Send us a quick note to schedule a call or a demo to find out how Locus software can completely streamline your water sampling and reporting.

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April 2, 2021

Cloud / SaaS, Environmental Information Management, GIS / Mapping

5 Powerful Features of Locus Environmental Software

Maybe you are a user of Locus’ Environmental Software (EIM) and are looking to get more out of our product. Or perhaps you are using another company’s software platform and looking to make a switch to Locus’ award-winning solution. Either way, there are some features that you may not know exist, as Locus software is always evolving by adding more functionality for a range of customer needs. Here are five features of our environmental software that you may not know about:

1. APIs for Queries

Locus expanded the EIM application programming interface (API) to support running any EIM Expert Query. Using a drag and drop interface, an EIM user can create an Expert Query to construct a custom SQL query that returns data from any EIM data table. The user can then call the Expert Query through the API from a web browser or any application that can consume a REST API. The API returns the results in JSON format for download or use in another program. EIM power users will find the expanded API extremely useful for generating custom data reports and for bringing EIM data into other applications.

2. Scheduled Queries for Expert Query Tool

The Expert Query Builder lets users schedule their custom queries to run at given times with output provided in an FTP folder or email attachment. Users can view generated files through the scheduler in a log grid, and configure notifications when queries are complete. Users can scheduled queries to run on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, or to run after an electronic data deliverable (EDD) of a specified format is loaded to EIM. Best of all, these queries can be instantly ran and configured from the dashboard.

Scheduled Queries in Locus EIM

3. Chart Formatting

Multiple charts can be created in EIM at one time. Charts can then be formatted using the Format tab. Formatting can include the ability to add milestone lines and shaded date ranges for specific dates on the x axis. The user can also change font, legend location, line colors, marker sizes and types, date formats, legend text, axis labels, grid line intervals or background colors. In addition, users can choose to display lab qualifiers next to non-detects, show non-detects as white filled points, show results next to data points, add footnotes, change the y-axis to log scale, and more. All of the format options can be saved as a chart style set and applied to sets of charts when they are created.

Chart Formatting in Locus EIM

4. Quick Search

To help customers find the correct EIM menu function, Locus added a search box at the top right of EIM. The search box returns any menu items that match the user’s entered search term.

Locus EIM Quick Search

5. Data Callouts in Locus’ Premium GIS Software

When the user runs the template for a specific set of locations, EIM displays the callouts in Locus’ premium GIS software, GIS+, as a set of draggable boxes. The user can finalize the callouts in the GIS+ print view and then send the resulting map to a printer or export the map to a PDF file.

Locus GIS+ Data Callouts

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April 1, 2021

Applications, Data Validation, Environmental Information Management, Infographic, Wastewater

Streamline and Save on Your DMR Reporting

The DMR tool in Locus’ Environmental Information Management (EIM) software solves the problem of time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive manual report generation by automating the data assembly, calculations, and formatting of Discharge Monitoring Reports. Depending on the type of discharge and the regulatory jurisdiction, you may be required to report information such as analytical chemistry of pollutants, flow velocity, total maximum daily load, and other parameters. For companies that report on multiple facilities, producing a DMR also becomes a major expense.

Thanks to Locus’ DMR tool, companies can generate DMRs within minutes with validated data in approved formats, with all of the calculations completed according to regulatory requirements. Companies can set up EIM for its permitted facilities and realize immediate cost and time savings during each reporting period. Locus users have saved over $2,000,000 on DMR reporting.

Locus continues to enhance the Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR) tool, recently implementing calculations needed to handle reporting of divalent metals. New formats, such as Florida DEP ezDMR, are regularly being added, so customers can meet their reporting requirements.

Contact us to see the DMR tool in action

March 11, 2021