LSPA Continuing Education Seminar
Environmental Symposium 2024

This course will focus on the practical application and understanding of US EPA’s ProUCL software for estimating Exposure Point Concentrations (EPCs). ProUCL is a statistical package commonly used to estimate upper confidence limits (UCLs) on means of environmental data sets that serve as EPCs in human health risk assessments. Use of UCLs as EPCs is recommended in the 2024 MCP amendments, which require an EPC to be “a conservative estimate of the mean.” Due to the increased use of UCLs, knowledge of how to calculate them, and more importantly, how to interpret UCLs and plan for supporting data collection, are important skills for environmental professionals. The course will also include discussion of common environmental data challenges and how those can be handled in the context of estimating EPCs.

Course participants will be expected to bring laptops and work through example problems using ProUCL.*  Participants will gain knowledge on how to construct ProUCL input files, run the software, and interpret the output/results. This hands-on approach will be supported by some discussion of core statistical theory to provide context for the ProUCL methods and application to site data.

Course Outline

1. EPC/UCL regulatory and guidance context
2. Core statistical concepts and applications
3. Hands-on instruction and use of the USEPA ProUCL software
4. Common environmental data challenges – small sample sizes, non-detects, and sample representativeness (e.g., concentration and spatial distributions, judgmental versus systematic sampling).

Time for Questions & Answers is included throughout. 

* ProUCL software, as well as a user’s and technical guide, are freely available for download from the USEPA.  ProUCL installation on a laptop may require administrator permissions (or IT assistance), and ProUCL may be available for only certain operating systems (e.g., Windows 10).