About Program

• Goals & Objectives
• Strategic Plan
• Other Documents

Our Research Goals

The Terrestrial, Freshwater, and Marine Ecosystems Program has five overarching goals that provide context for the science activities it supports:

1. To quantify and understand factors influencing patterns of temporal and spatial variability in key ecosystem components:

• Increase the understanding of the linkages between wetlands, rivers, lakes, and surrounding landscapes,
• Quantify the role of scaling in understanding and managing the spatial and temporal responses of biological systems to global change, and
• Increase understanding of coral reef ecosystem and coastal and estuarine environment.

2. To model factors controlling ecosystem patterns at various scales and develop decision support systems which integrate this information with management options:

• Develop and test management options for adapting to the effects of global change and minimizing undesired effects of global change, and
• Incorporate human dimensions (social and economic data) information into decision support and expert systems for management and conservation.

3. To develop indexes of ecosystem sensitivity to change and vulnerability to potential stressors, and tools to predict ecosystem responses to environmental change:

• Determine relative sensitivity of biological resources and geographic areas of the nation to global changes in order to detect early changes and prioritize response actions.

4. To devise a restoration and adaptive management framework for impaired ecosystems:

• Improve the scientific basis for wetlands rehabilitation and restoration,
• Improve methods for post fire rehabilitation, and
• Develop a USGS fire ecology research and management assistance plan.

5. To identify research areas representative of U.S. ecosystems and initiate a research reference site network:

• Develop strategy to designate and begin characterizing Index Sites representatives of the nation's ecosystems, and
• Select prototype sites with an initial focus on Department of the Interior lands.