Abstract

The State of the Nation's Ecosystems: Environmental Signals at the Macro Scale

Robin O'Malley

Director, Environmental Reporting Program

The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment

900 17th Street, NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20006

202-737-6307 omalley@heinzctr.org

The State of the Nation's Ecosystems project is a large scale project to provide periodic, scientifically credible, politically non-partisan, policy relevant reports on the condition and use of US ecosystems. It embodies a conclusion that such reporting, at a broad national scale, can contribute greatly to improving the quality of discourse and decisions about managing these resources, and provide important high level context for a myriad of individual status reports and other environmental information. The project faces significant technical challenges, including the design of indicators for complex phenomena across large spatial and temporal scales, and lack of measurement and aggregation approaches. It also faces crucial process or institutional challenges, ranging from agenda-driven disagreements about what should be measured and reported, huge data gaps and inconsistencies, a lack of a coherent structure for managing and optimizing the nation's monitoring efforts. The project's design accommodates these challenges and The Heinz Center and its collaborators hope to continue working to resolve or reduce them over time.