There are thousands of abandoned mines in the Western United States and residual heavy metal concentrations can be high in mine spoils. These spoils can also be quite acidic. Acidic soils with high concentrations of heavy metals can significantly impact the re-establishment and growth of native plant species at these sites. Even after removal of soils with the highest heavy metal concentrations, re-establishment of native species can be difficult because of the high acidity.  

Through our contract with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Â鶹´«Ã½ employee owners are supporting studies to develop methods for the remediation of contaminated mine soil and re-establishing native vegetation. This effort is important to helping prevent runoff and contamination of streams draining into larger watersheds.  

As part of this work, Â鶹´«Ã½ plant scientists are conducting greenhouse tests for the EPA to determine which soil amendments, such as biochar and lime, are most effective at mitigating the impacts of the metal contamination and acidity on the growth of native plants. This information will be used in recommendations for field applications of soil amendments at mine sites.

Drought is one of the most expensive and far-reaching natural disasters we face, contributing to wildfires and impacting everything from the food on our tables to the water in our taps and the barges carrying cargo down our rivers. 

To help communities, farmers, and leaders stay ahead of these dry spells, the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) team at has been working tirelessly behind the scenes. Their work so far in 2026 has had far-reaching impacts on data access. Below are some details of how the  team—supported by Â鶹´«Ã½ employee owners and NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information Science Task Order teammates, iSciences—are keeping the nation’s premier drought portal resilient, secure, and smarter than ever. 

Significant Milestone: The Mississippi River Basin Dashboard

One of the team’s proudest accomplishments is the launch and ongoing optimization of the . Covering 31 states and 40 percent of the contiguous U.S., this dashboard is a critical early-warning lifesaver for agricultural and maritime industries that rely on the basin. 

The dashboard has received incredible acclaim, even being selected for publication in the Fiscal Year 2025 NOAA Annual Transition Report! To keep this critical tool running perfectly, the team successfully implemented a brand-new, real-time streamflow tracking system using the modern U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Water Data API, ensuring water-level data never skipped a beat. This upgrade was necessary after the USGS officially retired its legacy “WaterWatch” tool in early 2026. 

Key Technical and Platform Upgrades

A sleeker, faster web experience – To give editors and scientists a better workspace and visitors a faster website, Â鶹´«Ã½ employee-owners led a major design transition and contributed a key patch allowing for the migration. The team retired older, slower website designs and upgraded the administrative interface to a highly customized, modern theme based on Drupal 11 Admin theme Gin. 

Bringing maps and historical data to life – Maps are the heart of . In the spring of 2026, the team made maps incredibly local and interactive: 

• Locality Realignment: Over the last decade, Connecticut replaced its old county boundaries with local “Planning Regions.” The team updated the entire Drought.gov database, mapping files, and historical data tools to match this real-world change, ensuring Connecticut residents get perfectly accurate local reports. 
• Automated Image Scraping: To ensure other weather organizations (like the National Weather Service) can easily download and share static snapshots of Drought.gov maps, the team built a unified “image scraper” that automatically packages up-to-date graphics and stores them in secure cloud-storage buckets.

Hardening Cyber Security and Cloud Training – The team took significant strides to prepare for NOAA’s overarching transition to the cloud while keeping our active codebases airtight against cyber threats. 

• Zero Vulnerability Goals: The team successfully integrated security scans directly into the software pipelines. After resolving several flagged items, they achieved perfect scores on multiple core codebases—yielding zero vulnerabilities! 
• Cloud Readiness: To prepare for the future, members of the team completed intensive Amazon Web Services Cloud Training cohorts to ensure they are ready to build, monitor, and optimize drought data streams in cloud-native environments. 

More than 30 million people rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water, and they support a fisheries industry valued at $5.1 billion annually.  Monitoring the Lakes’ water chemistry is a vital part of maintaining the quality of this key natural resource. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for collecting and testing water samples in each of the five Great Lakes as part of a long-term monitoring project. The agency’s staff collected more than 600 samples in 2024 followed by more than 1,000 in 2025. Through our contract with the U.S. EPA Great Lakes Program Office, Â鶹´«Ã½ employee owners are responsible for analyzing these water samples for nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. In excess, these nutrients degrade water quality and are known to lead to harmful algal blooms in certain areas of the Lakes. 

Data from these analyses are used to support evaluations of Great Lakes’ water quality.  Learn more about . 

Â鶹´«Ã½ employee-owners bring exceptional dedication and expertise to the National Ocean Service (NOS) Agreements, Grants, and Acquisitions Division, supporting several Financial Management Centers (FMCs) through complex, high‑priority initiatives. 

Â鶹´«Ã½ has played a key role in helping FMCs navigate the U.S. Department of Treasury’s G‑Invoicing system during a period of transition and heavy workload. Â鶹´«Ã½ staff recognized the challenges many teams were facing and broke down the system’s complex requirements into clear, manageable guidance, equipping FMCs with the information and confidence they needed to implement G‑Invoicing effectively. 

Â鶹´«Ã½ established a G‑Invoicing Community of Practice—creating a collaborative space for users to share information, troubleshoot challenges, and exchange best practices. Through this collaborative space Â鶹´«Ã½ staff provided consistent updates and meeting recaps ensure that those unable to attend sessions stay well‑informed and supported. 

As part of this contract, Â鶹´«Ã½ staff took on the significant task of migrating in‑flight documents and data into G‑Invoicing on behalf of FMCs. This effort eased the workload for already stretched Inter-Agency Agreement coordinators and ensured key agreements were accurately transitioned. This effort helped ensure FMCs were well‑positioned ahead of required timelines, helping NOS stay on track compared to other NOAA offices facing similar challenges. 

In addition, Â鶹´«Ã½ supported the major overhaul of the NOS Agreements Handbook, applying subject‑matter expertise to help refresh guidance and clarify processes for users across the organization. 

Federal staff Â鶹´«Ã½ have supported through this effort have expressed their gratitude and appreciation to Â鶹´«Ã½ staff’s invaluable dedication, expertise, and professionalism while guiding staff through challenging transitions with ease. 

Photo credit: Scott Graham, Unsplash

Safety is of the utmost importance in new construction or renovations. Â鶹´«Ã½ employee owners, supporting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) BaseLINE program helped develop and implement a proactive approach to evaluating safety and health conditions in newly constructed and renovated spaces before occupancy. 

The NIH BaseLINE program, Building Assessment of Safety Elements (Base) Lighting, Indoor air quality, Noise, Ergonomics (LINE), is a systematic readiness and safety assessment survey used for newly constructed or renovated facilities. Using the BaseLine approach, industrial hygienists and safety professionals work in coordination with facility managers, engineers, and project personnel to evaluate indoor environmental quality, ventilation performance, safety systems, ergonomic conditions and overall occupancy readiness. Traditionally these surveys are completed independently rather than holistically. The collaborative nature of the BaseLine approach incorporates health and safety protections into both the physical and operational processes. 

This proactive safety evaluation ensures operation avoids exposing occupants to hazards that may be construction-related but that may not have been caught until an annual inspection and therefore may not be identified as construction-related. This supports safer environments for occupants, improves operational readiness, and long-term facility performance.  

For additional information , which was coauthored by the Deputy Director of NIH Division of Safety and a biocontainment engineer at NIH.

The International Coral Reef Symposium is an excellent opportunity for the global coral reef community to come together and share experiences, research, solutions, and traditional knowledge with the shared goal of protecting coral reefs and safeguarding their future.   

As part of our joint venture with Research Planning, Inc., our coral reef ecologists supporting the and attended the in Auckland, New Zealand. Our team had the opportunity to network with global colleagues and collaborate on issues affecting coral reefs around the world. 

In addition, staff presented on several projects. Below is a list of the presentations they delivered. 

• Life-history Strategies of Corals: Evidence from Population Trends and Demographic Rates  
• Endangered, Threatened, and Stressed Out: What the U.S. National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Reveals about ESA-Listed Caribbean Coral Populations  
• More Than Just Counting Corals: What the U.S. National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Can Tell Atlantic Reef Managers About Benthic Community Status and Trends 
• More than Decade of Rapid Coral Community Change on U.S. Atlantic Reefs: What the U.S. National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Can Tell Atlantic Reef Managers About Benthic Community Status and Trends

Â鶹´«Ã½ delivers specialized cleanroom services for aerospace and other mission-critical environments. Our trained teams of employee owners safely operate high-reach industrial equipment around sensitive flight hardware and ground support equipment while maintaining strict cleanliness and contamination-control standards. 

From ongoing cleanroom maintenance and site-specific protocol development to workforce training, Â鶹´«Ã½ provides the expertise needed to support safe, clean, and operationally ready facilities. 

Â鶹´«Ã½ recently launched our Florida Leased Facilities Team! Supporting the aerospace sector throughout Central Florida, these employee owners provide facility operations and maintenance coordination, HVAC, electrical, and general maintenance expertise. From preventive to reactive maintenance repairs, they help ensure each facility remains safe, functional, and ready for daily operations. 

Their professionalism, teamwork, and commitment to quality make a meaningful difference every day. Thank you to the entire Florida Leased Facilities Team for representing Â鶹´«Ã½ with pride and delivering dependable service to our customers!

Long after wildfires are extinguished, ongoing efforts continue to assess long-term damage and contamination. Â鶹´«Ã½ employee owners are often heavily involved in these efforts and follow up to ensure response operations do not impact the environment. 

Response efforts in South California continued throughout the year following the 2025 wildfires that devastated the Los Angeles area. Â鶹´«Ã½ continued to support the damage assessment through a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 9 Superfund Technical Assessment & Response Team (START) subcontract with Weston Solutions, Inc.  

Â鶹´«Ã½ START Senior Chemist supported Phase 1 (removing hazardous material) of the 2025 Southern California wildfires response in the field as a group supervisor, overseeing six START field team leaders and collaborating with the EPA group supervisor to effectively and efficiently conduct removal of household hazardous materials (such as batteries, chemicals, paint, cleaners, and more) from residential properties affected by the wildfires. This prepares the area for Phase 2 (debris removal) and reduces risk of additional contamination and exposure to residents, and keeps those items out of local landfills. 

As part of Phase 1 wildfire responses, staff on site conduct soil sampling and testing before and after staging of collected hazardous materials for disposal, to confirm that operations did not impact the soil at that site. Â鶹´«Ã½ observed this process for reporting purposes and acted as a third-party validator for collected samples. 

Throughout the ongoing Phase 1 effort, Â鶹´«Ã½ START staff supported the EPA Environmental Unit with the response by observing the sampling, validating the analytical data from the laboratory, and summarizing the process and results in reports that provide official documentation for public record. 

Learn more about additional support Â鶹´«Ã½ provided during this response effort. 

NOAA relies on orbiting satellites to collect data for Climate Data Records (CDR). However, these satellites degrade over time and can be at risk of failing. Degradation or failure of critical space instruments can cause interruptions in Earth’s climate system data, disrupting the ongoing record collection.  

In support of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, Â鶹´«Ã½ program manager for CDR proactively managed product transitions that were impacted from major instrument upgrades. This included the retirement of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) satellite sensor, AMSR2, that is used to track sea ice as well as the decommissioning of the NOAA POES sensor in 2025, which was used in many CDRs. Â鶹´«Ã½ coordinated with data centers and external partners to align these aging satellite feeds with the new satellite feeds, providing upgraded CDRs to advance the monitoring of the Earth’s systems. This proactive risk management ensures downstream users can depend on CDRs for their decision-making needs. 

Learn more about .