Environmental Legal Research Guide: Scientific Resources

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry ToxFAQs provides information about contaminants found at hazardous waste sites.

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Tox Profiles provides information about contaminants found at hazardous waste sites (more scientific).

Sponsored by the National Council for Science and the Environment, the Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE) is an electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The EoE is a free, expert-reviewed collection of content contributed by scholars, professionals, educators, practitioners and other experts. Useful for basic scientific reference information on environmental issues.

The ECOTOXicology database (ECOTOX) is a source for locating single chemical toxicity data for aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife. Includes toxicity data derived predominately from the peer-reviewed literature, for aquatic life, terrestrial plants, and terrestrial wildlife, respectively. Users should review the limitations of the system prior to performing searches on this site.

TRI is a database containing data on disposal or other releases of over 600 toxic chemicals from thousands of U.S. facilities and information about how facilities manage those chemicals through recycling, energy recovery, and treatment.

List of Data Finders found across the federal government that provide downloadable data that is relevant to environmental analyses. Data contained within these sites could be used to complement data analyses being performed using data from EPA.

Provides access to agricultural chemical usage reports, chemical use information (including a searchable database), as well as links to the Census of Argriculture.

The NTIS serves as the largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information available today. For more than 60 years NTIS has assured businesses, universities, and the public timely access to approximately 3 million publications covering over 350 subject areas.

National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health contains select information on several hundred chemicals/classes for workers, employers, and occupational health professionals.

The full version of this article was originally published in The Judges’ Journal, Volume 54, Number 3, 2015.

The National Library of Medicine's Toxicology Data service provides free access to information on toxicology, hazardous chemicals, environmental health, and toxic releases.