Toward a national program for monitoring environmental resources

A conceptual framework is presented for integrating the nation's environmental research and monitoring networks, which will enable comprehensive and integrated assessments of natural resources. This framework can link inventories and remote sensing, national and regional resources surveys, and intensive monitoring and research sites with research and modeling to produce an integrated national environmental monitoring program. This integration of the nation's major environmental monitoring and research networks can allow understanding, assessment, evaluation, and forecasting of its renewable natural resources at national and regional scales. It can also enhance and support our understanding and ability to predict the causes and consequences of environmental change and ecosystem response, address multiple scales of ecosystem and resource interactions, and allow system-level syntheses and assessments of data and information. Network integration provides an "added value" that the current array of fragmented single-purpose networks cannot.