Exposure to hydraulic fracturing fluid in drinking water increases the risk of many adverse health outcomes. Unfortunately, most individuals and researchers are unaware of the health risks posed by a particular well due to the diversity of chemical ingredients used across sites. We constructed WellExplorer (http://WellExplorer.org), an interactive tool for researchers and community members to use for retrieving information regarding the hormonal, testosterone and estrogen modulators located at each well. We found that wells in Alabama use a disproportionately high number of ingredients targeting estrogen pathways, while Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania use a disproportionately high number of ingredients targeting testosterone pathways. Researchers can utilize WellExplorer to study health outcomes related to exposure to fracturing chemicals in their population-based cohorts. Community members can use this resource to search their home or work locations (e.g. town or zip code) to determine proximity between where they live or work and specific hormonal exposures.
(1) Motivation: A long standing problem in Environmental DNA has been the inability to compute across large number of datasets. Here we introduce an Open Source software frame work that can store a large number of Environmental DNA datasets, as well as provide a platform for analysis, in an easily customizable way. We show the utility of such an approach by analyzing over 1400 arthropod datasets. (2) Results: This article introduces a new software framework, met, which utilizes large numbers ofmetabarcode datasets to draw conclusions about patterns of diversity at large spatial scales. Given more accurate estimations on the distribution of variance in metabarcode datasets, this software framework could facilitate novel analyses that are outside the scope of currently available similar platforms. (3) Availability: All code are published under the Mozilla Public License ver 2.0 on the met project page: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SPB8V
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