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U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY'S ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH STRATEGY
Citation:
Barnwell Jr., T O. AND B. M. Levinson. U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY'S ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH STRATEGY. Presented at International Congress on Ecosystem Health - Managing for Ecosystem Health, Sacramento, CA, August 15-20, 1999.
Description:
EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) has recently released a research strategy to guide its program to improve ecosystem risk assessment and risk management, which is one of the Agency's higheset priority search areas (http://www.epa.gov/ORD/WebPubs/fmal/eco.pdf). It is ORD's vision that, in the next decade, EPA researchers will have developed the next generation of measurements, models and technologies necessary to protect both the present and probable fture sustainabidfty of ecosystems at local, watershed, and regional scales. The general direction of EPA's research program is to larger scales, a more holistic systems view, assessment of cumulative stress, determination of relative vulnerability to multiple stressors, and development of alternative management strategies for flexible decision-making. This research strategy supports EPA's changing regulatory perspective towards less centralized, more flexible decision-rnaking, and to more accountability to achieve results. Obviously, this is not a vision or goal that can be accomplished by ORD alone, but it is one that will be dependent on contributions from in-house and extramural research programs, other agencies, the academic community, states, and others. The purpose of this poster is to provide an overview of EPA's changing research program and discuss how the extramural community can contribute to it's success through the Science To Achieve Results (STAR) extramural research programs in Ecological Indicators, Regional Scaling, Water and Watersheds Research and Integrated Assessments.