What We Expect to Accomplish

The USGS has organized its strategic planning into two comprehensive, integrated mission goals that group our scientific activities in a way that is meaningful to those who use our data and information: (1) Hazards and (2) Environment and Natural Resources. Each of these mission goals has an associated long-term goal with performance targets. They are the framework within which we bring to bear our world leadership and excellence in geology, biology, hydrology, and geography to address societal issues. As these societal issues become increasingly complex, addressing them will require broader scale, integrated approaches in the future. For example:

• Issues such as habitat fragmentation, coastal erosion, and climate change must be examined on a broad, even global, scale if we are to understand how systems are affected by change.
• Pollution issues increasingly require consideration of multiple sources and complex interactive effects. Solutions are becoming more costly and involve multiple parties.
• Water resources issues are growing more complicated. Effective management requires consideration of surface water-groundwater interactions, the impact of land use on water quality and quantity, and vulnerability of people and infrastructure to hazards. These problems arise in the context of scarcity and competition for the resource.
• Managers are increasingly seeking detailed understanding of species´ habitat requirements as they face difficult decisions about how to accommodate economic growth while preserving key species.
• Population growth is leading to complex changes in our landscapes that will have dramatic impacts on land, water, and living resources.

A USGS scientist inspects a radio-reporting flood warning gage at the East branch of the Rahway River, at Millburn, New Jersey.

Planners and decision-makers need sophisticated new tools that allow them to ask "what if" questions and to explore alternative future scenarios. Such decision support tools will build upon a strong foundation of USGS research findings in the natural sciences. Moreover, many solutions will require active partnership with universities and other public and private agencies.

As the science bureau of the Department of the Interior, USGS provides information and technologies that are critical to the mission achievement of Department land and resource management agencies. USGS and the resource management bureaus of the Department of the Interior have formalized a process to provide USGS science support to the DOI bureaus that will eventually provide input to USGS for defining GPRA metrics and outcomes. USGS mission and long-term goals support all five of the Department of the Interior´s strategic goals, but are most directly relevant to Goal 4, "Provide Science for a Changing World."

The Department has defined the following outcomes for its Goal 4:

• Resource managers make decisions based on accurate, reliable, and impartial scientific information.
• The loss of life and property from natural disasters is minimized through access and availability of timely scientific information.
• Federal, State, and local governments and the private sector have access to shared national databases of natural resources information.
• The public has easy access to earth science information.

USGS goals and performance measures link directly to achievement of these outcomes.

SCIENCE AND PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

Most quantitative measures of scientific productivity address outputs (for example the number of journal articles published) rather than outcomes and convey little sense of the true public benefits that science provides. We believe the USGS obligation is to do important work on relevant topics and to communicate the results to decision makers. Nonetheless, we are striving to move to more outcome-oriented performance measurement in future years, improved ability to capture and quantify how customers and partners are using USGS information, and improve the usefulness and accessibility of USGS data and information.