The Environmental Laboratory (EL) was officially stood up in 1978, absorbing several different research organizations of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers focused on environmental research, most notably the Environmental Effects Laboratory (EEL) at the U.S. Army Waterways Experiment Station (WES) in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Environmental Laboratory is still based in Vicksburg, Mississippi and conducts research in ecosystem science and technology, environmental resiliency, environmental sensing, ecological modeling and forecasting, risk and decision science, environmentally sustainable material, systems biology, climate change, and environmental security.