An Evaluation of the U.S. Navy's Extremely Low Frequency Submarine Communications Ecological Monitoring Program

Download or read book An Evaluation of the U.S. Navy's Extremely Low Frequency Submarine Communications Ecological Monitoring Program written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1997-07-25 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. Navy established an ecological monitoring program to determine whether electric and magnetic fields from extremely low frequency (ELF) communications systems influenced plant and animal populations near the transmitting facilities. Although some of the researchers believe that a few biological changes might have occurred, they concluded that the results do not indicate significant adverse ecological effects. This book evaluates the 11 ecological studies of the Navy's monitoring program and examines the adequacy of experimental design, the data collection and analysis, and the soundness of the conclusions. It also addresses whether the monitoring program was capable of detecting subtle effects due to ELF exposure and examines the biological changes observed by some program researchers, such as enhanced tree growth.