The health of forested, river and estuarine ecosystems will be assessed during an environmental research conference to be held at UC Davis Tuesday, Sept. 10, and Wednesday, Sept. 11. Though the conference is national in scope, California's ecosystems will be strongly featured, says Kate Scow, a professor of soil microbial ecology at UC Davis and conference director. Among highlights of the conference will be UC Davis researchers' presentations about environmental risk assessment of the Sacramento River watershed, impact of airborne pollutants on forests in the Sierra, and groundwater quality in the Central Valley. "The conference will stress the importance to society of maintaining functional ecosystems and of improving the quality of degraded environments," Scow says. Ecosystem health assessment, Scow explains, requires understanding how pollutants move and change within the environment, determining pollutants' effect on plant and animal life, and quantifying the risk in order to set policy and conduct economic analyses. The conference is sponsored by the UC Davis-based Center for Ecological Health Research and is funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.