Monitoring, Assessment, and Diagnosis of Ecological Condition

The Agency's Office of Research and Development (ORD) has set the goal to provide the scientific understanding to measure, model, maintain and restore the integrity and sustainability of highly valued ecosystems. To do this, ORD has organized its research to answer scientific questions such as:

What is the current ecosystem condition, what are trends in this condition, and what stressors appear to have been responsible for harm or deterioration?
How do biological, chemical and physical processes affect the condition of ecosystems, and how can we most accurately diagnose problems facing ecosystems and forecast future effects?

These questions are the basis for much of NHEERL's research to characterize ecological condition, with an emphasis on: 1) providing tools to monitor ecosystem condition in a manner that reflects the scale of the problem, the causes of harm, and the success or failure of restoration and mitigation efforts; and 2) developing models and methods that help diagnose the causes of degradation to ecosystems and forecast future condition.

It has become apparent in recent years that establishing an understanding of overall condition is necessary, but not sufficient to ensure the protection of aquatic ecosystems. Once overall condition is established, the specific waters which have problems, and the particulars of the causes of those problems, must be identified to allow development of appropriate restoration strategies. In addition, once the systems most likely to have problems have been located, confirmation of the problem and diagnosis of the specific cause(s) of that impairment are necessary to develop the most appropriate, cost effective means to restore the ecosystem to its desired state. To support this approach, AED's current research to support characterization and diagnosis of condition is structured in three parts:

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Monitoring, Assessment, and Diagnosis of Ecological Condition

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