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Report on the Environment Trend Summary Protocol
Citation:
Fry, M., B. Bierwagen, J. Carleton, P. Murphy, AND M. Pennino. Report on the Environment Trend Summary Protocol. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-23/321, 2025.
Impact/Purpose:
For each EPA Report on the Environment (ROE) indicator, this Trends Summary Protocol summarizes how EPA will present information about the directionality of trends over time (getting better, getting worse, or neutral) on the ROE website in the form of a symbolic representation accompanied by a succinct key story. Every ROE indicator will be assessed and presented following this approach. The ROE will focus on apparent trends over the entire period for which a given indicator has data available. This effort also includes developing a short summary of the “key story” for each ROE indicator. This messaging will summarize the trend and provide useful high-level context.
Description:
The Report on the Environment (ROE) team within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) has enhanced the presentation of information on the ROE website by adding summaries of indicator trends, or changes in indicators over time. In 2020, ORD convened subject matter experts from EPA Program Offices for a series of workshops to brainstorm approaches. Following the workshops, an EPA ROE trends workgroup further developed the concept and plan for presenting a summary of indicator trends on the ROE website. A new, sortable summary table allows ROE users to see, at a glance, trend directions either for all indicators, or for user-selected subsets of indicators (e.g., within a given indicator theme area such as air or health). This trend summary table includes two elements: • Symbols representing trend direction for each indicator. • Key stories providing brief, high level descriptions of each indicator trend. The purpose of this document is to lay out the ROE protocol for defining the trend direction for each indicator and developing the associated key stories. This protocol serves as a roadmap for establishing the trend direction symbols and key stories for existing ROE indicators and any new (or newly updated) indicators as they are added to the ROE.
URLs/Downloads:
REPORT ON THE ENVIRONMENT TREND SUMMARY PROTOCOL.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 1528.52 KB, about PDF)https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/roe-program-publications-and-activities