In recent years, increasing concerns about the nation's biological resources have led to calls for a new biological survey. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt has recently initiated the process of forming a National Biological Survey (NBS) within D OI. To create the new agency, the Secretary is combining portions of the biological research and survey activities from DOI bureaus.
As identified in the department's FY 1994 budget justification to Congress, the mission of the NBS is "to gather, analyze, and disseminate the information necessary for the wise stewardship of our Nation's natural resources, and to foster an understandin g of our biological systems and the benefits they provide to society. The NBS will act as an independent science bureau without advocating positions on resource management issues and without regulatory or land and water development authorities."
In February 1993, Secretary Babbitt requested advice from the National Research Council on the formation of the NBS. In response, the Committee on the Formation of the National Biological Survey, was formed, consisting of scientists and persons with ex perience in government, industry, and public-interest organizations. The committee conducted its study from March to September 1993. This timetable was designed to ensure that DOI received timely advice on its activities.
The committee was charged with addressing scientific, functional, information, and coordination issues related to the scope and direction of the NBS in the context of the larger national picture. It is important to note that the charge included neither an examination of whether or not the NBS should be established nor a detailed evaluation of DOI's specific proposal. In addressing its charge, the committee discovered a wide range of national needs, a broad distribution of relevant efforts and resources already occurring in federal and nonfederal organizations in a relatively uncoordinated fashion, and a wide range of management needs within the Department of the Interior. These findings, combined with the short timeframe, led the committee to conclude that it would be most effective in fulfilling its charge if it focused on the broader needs, opportunities, and activities as they related to the stated goals of the NBS rather than concentrating on the details of its structure or specific research agend a, except to the extent that such an examination seemed essential to deal with the broader issues.
This report proposes a research agenda for the National Biological Survey that is far broader than the existing research effort in the Department of the Interior but that is also focused according to likely immediate and long-term user needs. A Nation al Biotic Resources Information System is envisioned to make reliable biological information more accessible to diverse users. The report also describes how the many public and private entities involved in current research on biological resources can wor k together in a new entity, which the committee has called the National Partnership for Biological Survey, to provide comprehensive information that will be useful for decision-makers at all levels of government and outside government.
A biological survey for the nation will provide information that is critical for addressing a number of issues:
Some common weaknesses exist in the availability of information to address those issues. In some instances, data have been collected but are not organized in useful ways. In many cases, data are unavailable, have not been collected over a sufficiently long time for trends to be separated from short-term variations, have been collected only in a few localities, or have not been recorded in a format that can be used to make decisions about the management, use, and conservation of the nation's biological resources.
Many national and local agencies have responsibilities for understanding and managing the nation's biological resources, but there is no effective cross-institutional framework for identifying and conducting research of the highest priority, coordinating research activities, or making information available in a coherent and usable way to the many agencies and other organizations that need it.
The National Biological Survey is a critical step toward assembling a comprehensive assessment of the nation's biological resources, but it cannot by itself come close to meeting the full range of needs and objectives in scientific research, inventory, a nd information management that a biological survey for the nation must fulfill. The .i.National Biological Surveymission; NBS should therefore have a dual mission: to meet the scientific research and information needs of .i.Department of the Interior (D OI); DOI for management of the lands within its jurisdiction and species for which it has responsibility (and geographic areas that affect either of the above) and to provide national leadership and vision for this comprehensive assessment. To achieve th e best possible results, this assessment must be a coordinated national effort at all organizational and jurisdictional levels. This joint enterprise can be called the National Partnership for Biological Survey. The committee therefore recommends the fo llowing:
The United States, under the leadership of the Department of the Interior, should establish a National Partnership for Biological Survey (NPBS). This will be a new national, multisector, cooperative program of federal, state, and local agencies; muse ums; academic institutions; and private organizations. Its purpose will be to collect, house, assess, and provide access to the scientific information needed to understand the current state of the nation's biological resources (status), how that status i s changing (trends), and the causes of the changes.
The mandate and mission of DOI make it the logical agency to lead the development and implementation of the National Partnership. The department has broad research and management responsibilities for the biological resources of the nation and strong lin ks to key nonfederal partners, and by initiating the formation of the National Biological Survey, it has already indicated its willingness to take on a leadership role.
Although the National Partnership does not yet exist formally, many of its elements do.
To carry out its responsibilities, the Partnership, including NBS, must have several specific functional capabilities. It must be
One of the most important uses of the scientific information gathered by the National Partnership is to assist decision-makers in addressing existing issues about biological resources and in anticipating future ones. The National Partnership should deve lop a strong, scientifically credible research program designed to meet this goal.
The research of the Partnership should identify changes in biological resources and determine why those changes are happening. It should identify trends in a timely manner so that actions can be taken while multiple options are available, determine how local actions influence events elsewhere, reduce the chances of taking costly remedial actions unnecessarily, evaluate the effectiveness of management decisions, and direct attention to areas where problems are most likely to develop in the near future, s uch as urban expansion zones, estuaries, rivers, and zones of intensive resource extraction.
Key scientific objectives of the National Partnership for Biological Survey should include the following:
NBS should perform research needed for the management of lands within the jurisdiction of DOI and species for which it has responsibility. It should also ensure, both through its own scientific activities and its proposed role of national leadership, that needed research is performed to fulfill the central purpose envisioned for the National Partnership--to generate the information required to understand the current status of the nation's biological resources, how that status is changing, and the caus es of the changes.
The committee believes that DOI should work to ensure that needed research is done by NBS or other entities no matter what specific form the Partnership eventually takes. To fulfill its scientific mission, the NBS will need additional staff in a number of scientific disciplines. It should perform a systematic assessment of needs based on existing staff capabilities and program requirements and develop and implement a plan to hire needed experts. This should be the activity of highest priority for the application of additional budget and staffing resources. Agencies whose participation is essential to the success of the Partnership, such as the National Science Foundation, should receive increased funding so that the Partnership can take full advantag e of the nation's relevant scientific expertise. Funding increases will also be needed for other appropriate agencies.
One of the challenges for the Partnership is to communicate research results effectively to resource managers, planners, legislators, and regulators. These users have questions whose answers are not obvious in existing research products. The NBS and ot hers involved in the Partnership should consult with users to find ways of disseminating information so that it can be applied most effectively.
There is an urgent need to organize existing information and make it more readily available and to coordinate future data collection and exchange. The committee therefore recommends that
Under the leadership of NBS, the Partnership should develop a National Biotic Resource Information System. This should be a distributed federation of databases designed to make existing information more accessible and to establish mechanisms for effic ient, coordinated collection and dissemination of new information.
An effective National Biotic Resource Information System will require substantial cultural and institutional changes to build stronger bridges among the broad spectrum of producers and users of biological data. The NBS should take the lead in promoting standards for biological-survey data and for meeting the key requirements for an effective distributed database. It should collaborate with other federal initiatives to develop national and global environmental databases and should also support database development by states, museums, and universities. The NBS will need to commit adequate resources to ensure that its diverse user community receives timely dissemination of reliable, high-quality data and information presented in a variety of formats.
The National Partnership should establish well-coordinated efforts to develop standard sets of spatial data. For example, sufficiently detailed, computerized maps of actual vegetation do not exist for much of the United States. To remedy these deficien cies, the NPBS should participate in the National Spatial Data Infrastructure; promote greater awareness and use of spatial data and technologies; increase efforts to locate field data spatially; adopt, where appropriate, existing standards for mapping an d spatial data handling; and increase the role of biologists in efforts to develop standards for spatial data.
To meet the growing needs of all sectors of society for biodiversity data and information, the NPBS should have a strong capability for publication and product communicationincreased online access to data, reports, and bibliographies; publication of sel ected data sets on CD-ROM and other media; and expanded publication of synthetic documents. The NPBS should produce appropriate paper publications such as instructional materials, range and habitat maps, atlases of distribution and trends in regional bio diversity, floras and faunas, field guides and manuals, taxonomic monographs, and summaries of surveys and trends. The most important paper publications will be peer-reviewed scientific articles and reports.
Software tools must be responsive and readily accessible to all users. The NPBS should expand efforts to develop tools for data visualization and analysis, for data reformatting and conversion, for trend analysis of monitoring data, for spatial interpol ation of sighting and collection data, and for Geographic Information System (GIS) habitat modeling.
Coordination among its various participants is a key to the success of the Partnership. Because it will be a national program that cuts across political, jurisdictional, and geographic boundaries, it will need a mechanism through which all sectors invol ved can advocate, justify, and discuss proposed programs and activities that will affect them. Because the scope and activities of the National Partnership are quite broad, and because of the extensive amount of intergovernmental and nongovernmental coor dination required, the committee believes that no existing model for national coordination is readily adaptable to the National Partnership. A unique and innovative process is probably needed. It therefore recommends the following:
Formal mechanisms should be established for coordination among the entities with responsibilities for the National Partnership for Biological Survey. The mechanisms should collectively exhibit the five characteristics described below.
The coordination mechanisms should
An effective mechanism for federal coordination might be an interdepartmental committee on biological survey. Such a committee could be chaired by the Secretary of the Interior and include the heads of key federal departments and agencies involved in th e Partnership. The mechanism should provide cross-agency coordination of federal policies and participation in the Partnership and it should identify federal-agency priorities for the conduct of biological research and resource assessments. The interage ncy committee would be both a forum for high-level policy discussion and coordination and a framework for increased day-to-day interaction at the working level.
Appropriate mechanisms also need to be established to obtain scientific advice for the Partnership and to ensure proper data management. These mechanisms would identify priorities for research and protocols for surveys and inventories; establish procedu res for quality assurance in research and data management, including the development of database standards; plan the development of the NPBS data network; and develop recommendations for ensuring access to data by public and private users. One way to obt ain the necessary advice and guidance would be to establish committees in science and data management.
The director of the NBS must be an acknowledged and respected professional leader in the biological-science community and should be selected in a way that helps to ensure the scientific independence of the agency. A chief scientist should be similarly a ppointed and should be free of management responsibilities other than for the development of scientific programs.
Much of the work of the NBS will serve needs within DOI. For example, in many instances, a DOI land manager might require on-site scientific expertise. Land-management bureaus should retain a small cadre of scientific expertise to address unique site-s pecific and short-term biological resources issues and to facilitate interaction between the bureaus and the NBS.
The secretary should establish an office in each state to facilitate joint NBS activities and to provide a communication channel among state agencies, private and individual participants, and federal agencies. This may be the most important consideratio n for ensuring that the NBS achieves liaison with all possible contributors.
Because a state organizational structure for the NBS is recommended, neither the NPBS or the NBS needs alternative geographical bases. Nonetheless, collection, analysis, and dissemination of data might, for some purposes, be categorized by ecological cr iteria that do not necessarily correspond with any political boundaries, such as watersheds, vegetation zones, or wildlife migration routes.
The NPBS research program should be well-balanced between the conduct of new fundamental research designed to advance science and the conduct of more practical research focused on near-term problem-solving. A robust national biological research program must encompass the entire spectrum. Because the NPBS must address many scientific needs and because the resulting information has many uses, no single criterion can be used to establish priorities.
A strength of the NPBS is that multiple criteria for setting priorities can be brought together under its coordinating framework. Priorities should be based on the degree to which proposed research advances the following goals:
Through its coordinating mechanisms and ability to set priorities, the National Partnership can provide increased efficiency in the use of scientific resources. Redundancies can be avoided or eliminated. Full use can be made of resources. Collaboratio n among public and private organizations can permit the development of projects that would be far too large or difficult for a single organization. Investments made now to improve the knowledge base should pay off in the future by lessening the risk of c ostly political conflict and the need for expensive environmental repair efforts.
Extensive biological research and inventory programs exist in several federal agencies. The proposed coordination mechanisms will permit better evaluation, prioritization and, where appropriate, reprogramming of current spending on programs relevant to the goals of the Partnership. Where necessary, the NBS should develop cooperative agreements. Effective leveraging of the other federal programs will necessitate some funding increases in the NBS budget to support these activities. Such increases in in vestment by the NBS will be more cost-effective than undertaking large new programs.
Much of the information generated by the Partnership will be exchanged over computer networks through a distributed federation of databases, which will be more cost-effective and efficient than a large centralized database. A federated approach that tak es full advantage of advances in information technology will permit rapid, easy access to a wide array of databases distributed around the country. To facilitate the sharing of data among participants, the NBS should establish a facility for archiving an d distributing regional and national data sets and for meeting the goals of DOI's new National Biological Status and Trends Program, which will be part of NBS.
NPBS data management should ensure that its databases coevolve with the major federal environmental and socioeconomic databases to minimize redundancy, to avoid conflicting terminology and classification systems, and to maintain consistent data standards and formats.
Implementation of both the NBS and the Partnership should be phased in according to a well planned strategy that provides for early results. The strategy should identify specific near-term, intermediate-term, and longer-term priorities. Otherwise, too m any tasks might be initiated at one time, programs might be started before clear goals have been established, and results might therefore fall short of needs and expectations. The committee therefore recommends as follows:
Development of the National Partnership and the National Biological Survey should be guided by a single strategic implementation plan developed under the leadership of the Department of the Interior with the full participation of NPBS partners. Some p roposed key elements of the plan are listed below.
The National Partnership has the potential to serve the nation well as it grapples with increasingly contentious and challenging issues in managing its biological resources. Yet, the very richness and diversity of our biological resources mean that deci sions will often need to be made from incomplete information. Even when sufficient information is available, government must respond to public concerns that might influence decisions in a direction different from that indicated by scientific findings.
The NPBS will provide a much stronger information base from which to make decisions about the nation's biological resources, but hard choices and conflicts will remain. The National Partnership will be most useful in preventing costly environmental confr ontations if it has a paramount scientific function, maintains a long-term commitment to scientific excellence, and is well-integrated across its membership.
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