Academic Credentials
  • M.S., Resource Economics, University of Rhode Island, 1997

Ms. Semenova has over 15 years of professional experience in applied natural resource and environmental economics. Her areas of expertise include assessing economic damages resulting from natural and human-caused incidents, developing restoration alternatives to compensate for losses to natural resources, and conducting economic impact analyses for environmental regulations.

In the natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) and restoration services arena, Ms. Semenova has worked on cases involving oil spills, chemical releases, and wildland fires. Ms. Semenova works closely with clients and counsel on developing innovative and cost-effective restoration options, scaling restoration options based on quantifiable injury, and negotiating restoration alternatives with state and federal Trustees. She has specialized expertise on how to scale restoration alternatives for terrestrial and aquatic resources, including wetlands, plankton, fishes, corals, and benthic macroinvertebrates. She relies upon habitat equivalency analyses (HEA) to scale restoration-based damage estimates that are used in settlement negotiations with Trustees. Ms. Semenova develops project-specific conceptual designs for restoration alternatives that offset injury to natural resources. She has extensive experience with estimating monetary values associated with implementation of those projects and resulting economic damages. Ms. Semenova has extensive skills in a variety of assessment methodologies for valuation of natural resources that allow her to conduct assessments of economic liability for damages to natural resources. Those areas include estimating monetary losses from beach and fisheries closures; affected recreational activities such as swimming, hiking, birdwatching; lead, mercury, other chemical contamination; and oil spills. Ms. Semenova recently provided economic support and evaluation of damage claims for human use losses that included losses to recreational anglers due to chemical contamination of rivers and other waterbodies. Those economic losses were associated with fish consumption and recreational use advisories. Her knowledge of various economic techniques from market valuation to benefits transfer to Contingent Valuation (CV) gives her a good understanding of methods frequently used in environmental litigation. Semenova's experience in non-market valuation methods, in particular, gives her unique insights into how these approaches could be used in the courtroom. Ms. Semenova has performed economic analyses assessing the impacts of environmental regulations for over 12 years. She has extensive experience conducting benefits assessment, cost-benefit analysis, regulatory analysis, non-market valuation, and statistical analysis. On behalf of a trade association, Ms. Semenova recently developed comments for the FDA proposed rule for safety and efficacy of consumer antiseptics. She provided an evaluation of the Regulatory Impact Analysis for over-the-counter consumer antiseptic hand and body washes containing certain active ingredients such as triclosan and triclocarban. For EPA, Ms. Semenova worked on various regulatory programs, including economics of toxic chemicals under Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA): mercury and perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) in certain products, lead in paints, formaldehyde in composite wood products; water quality and water use issues, including estimating economic benefits of water discharge regulations (316b under CWA); recreational activities; oil spill prevention under the Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasures (SPCC) rule; agriculture and pesticide use; and energy and climate change issues.