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Estuarine and Great Lakes Program (EAGLES)
In 2000, the US EPA granted authority to establish up to five Estuarine Indicator Research Programs. These Programs were designed to identify, evaluate, recommend and potentially develop a suite of new, integrative indicators of ecological condition, integrity, and/or sustainability that can be incorporated into long-term monitoring programs and which will complement ORD's intramural coastal monitoring program. The proposed research of the EAGLES Programs covers a large coastal area of the United States.
SCOPE OF RESEARCH
The EAGLES programs will attempt to:
- Develop indicators and/or procedures useful for evaluating the ‘health'
or condition of important coastal natural resources (e.g., lakes, streams,
coral reefs, coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, rivers, estuaries) at
multiple scales, ranging from individual communities to coastal drainage
areas to entire biogeographical regions.
- Develop indicators, indices, and/or procedures useful for evaluating
the integrated condition of multiple resource/ecosystem types within
a defined watershed, drainage basin, or larger biogeographical region
of the U.S.
- Develop landscape measures that characterize landscape attributes
and that concomitantly serve as quantitative indicators of a range of
environmental endpoints, including water quality, watershed quality,
freshwater/estuarine/marine biological condition, and habitat suitability.
- Develop nested suites of indicators that can both quantify the health or condition of a resource or system and identify its primary stressors at local to regional scales.
A Manager's Guide to Indicator Selection (PDF) (8 pp., 3.4MB)
New Index of Environmental Condition for
Coastal Watersheds in the Great Lakes Basin (PDF) (2 pp., 281KB)
