The Need for Ecological Information and the Useof Bioindicators in US Federal Regulatory Agencies

摘要

United States federal regulatory agencies develop indicators and other ecologicalinformation tools for a variety of reasons, including providing a framework for sup-porting decision making that is defensible to Congress and the public. Agencies typi-cally develop indicators for their own specific regulatory or programmatic purposesand coordination with other agencies and other indicator projects is often limited.Here we give an overview of incentives driving the development of indicators at differ-ent federal agencies and provide some examples of federally supported monitoring andindicator projects. There has been a trend in management and related indicatorprojects toward coordinating efforts across larger geographic scales (ecosystem/regional). However, there is currently insufficient institutional leadership to coordi-nate development of indicators at the national scale.