Environmental monitoring coupled with research provides a mutually beneficial synergism which allows scientists to: (1) efficiently monitor the environment using sensitive, relevant environmental signals to detect and quantify change, (2) determine when change is ecologically significant, and (3) determine the cause of change. From the perspective of potentially large-scale ecosystem impacts where causality is an objective, the authors believe that environmental monitoring (i.e., research-focused monitoring) is essential and serious decoupling of monitoring and research in the context is a weak strategy and a questionable environmental policy.