An Evaluation of the U.S. Navy's Extremely Low Frequency Submarine Communications Ecological Monitoring Program (1997) / Chapter Skim
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In 1982, the Navy established an ecological monitoring program to determine whether electric and magnetic fields (EMFs) from the ELF communications system affected plant and animal populations or otherwise caused ecological changes in the areas surrounding the transmitting facilities.
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Navy's Extremely Low Frequency Communications System Ecological Monitoring Program in 1995 to evaluate independently the program's objectives and design, data-collection methods, data analysis, and interpretations. The studies included in the ecological monitoring program were evaluated with standard criteria for all branches of scientific endeavor, including appropriateness and coherence of the hypotheses being tested, adequacy of experimental design to test these hypotheses, methods for data collection and analysis, and the soundness of conclusions drawn from investigators' observations.
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The program would have been improved by studying fewer variables at more and larger sites and by eliminating studies with poorly matched treatment and control sites. For example, in the soil arthropods and earthworms study, the dominant earthworm studied at the treatment site was not found at the control site.
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RESPONSE VARIABLES Many short- and long-term response variables were measured, including characteristics of bird populations, soil microbiology and ecology, plant ecology, insect populations and behavior, water quality, fish ecology, and reproduction. Such breadth is commendable for detecting potential effects at different ecological levels.
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APPROPRIATENESS OF INTERPRETATION In several studies, modest but significant differences were observed between data collected at treatment sites and data from control sites. Researchers conducting the studies concluded that five of these potential effects were
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as not being clearly related to ELF exposure included the increase in bee overwintering mortality, the reduction in leaves per bee nest cell, accelerated litter decomposition, early eye-opening in mice, and depressed earthworm reproductive rates. The committee believes that some of those differences were dismissed too readily as alleged artifacts of environmental variations or experiment design.
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was responsive to requests from researchers for additional engineering support. However, in its review of individual study reports, as well as of the overall program of monitoring for possible effects of the ELF antennas, this committee discovered weaknesses in some aspects of I]
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The present committee agrees with the general findings of the Navy's ecological monitoring program, within the limitations described in this report, that the researchers' observations provide no evidence of statistically significant, widespread, adverse effects of EMFs associated with the ELF antennas on bird populations, leaf-litter decomposition processes, upland flora, the movements of dragonfly larvae, the colonization of leaf litter, the movement of fish, soil arthropod populations, and soil ameba populations. However, some of the studies, as discussed in this report, had deficiencies that diminished their capabilities to detect small effects.
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The following recommendation and suggested next steps reflect this committee's understanding of such difficulties but also indicate the committee's concern for bringing this ecological monitoring program to an appropriate and fruitful conclusion. DO NOT REPEAT THE FIEED STUDIES Dispite the weaknesses of the monitoring studies, the committee does not recommend that the field studies be repeated, because the extensive studies conducted to date have provided no evidence that exposure to ELF EMFs had obvious adverse ecological effects.
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The wetland study unexpectedly discovered more moss cover on decomposition bags closer to the antenna treatment sites than in intermediate treatment or background control sites. The increased moss cover caused problems in interpreting data on decomposition, but the variability in growth of moss should be considered for controlled investigation.
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Such information might guide researchers in deciding which organisms and response variables are most likely to exhibit effects, if any, of the ELF antenna. REANALYSIS OR LABORATORY STUDIES SHOULD BE REVIEWED INDEPENDENTLY Reanalysis of exposure assessments might or might not identify some effects of ELF-EMF exposure on ecological variables not previously observed, and laboratory tests might or might not confirm them.
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