Mission Goals - Environment and Natural Resources

Our Nation´s renewable and nonrenewable natural resources -- biota, land, water, minerals, and energy -- are critical to sustain life and to maintain and enhance our economic strength. Looking back, environment and natural resource science has been at the heart of the country´s development since frontier days, as the USGS discovered and mapped the Nation´s natural resource base. To manage these resources while protecting the environment society must understand the complex and interconnected processes involving air, water, land, and plant and animal life. Traditional boundaries between environment and natural resource science have blurred as land and resource management decisions deal with increasingly complex issues. The need for the cross-disciplinary integrated science that the USGS provides has never been greater.

USGS environment and natural resources activities deal with physical, chemical, and biological processes in nature and with the interactions of human activities with natural systems; in short, understanding change and its consequences. These studies include data collection, long-term research assessments, ecosystem analysis, and forecasting changes, and implications of changes, that may be expected in the future.

USGS provides this essential data and information to managers and the public to assist in land and resource management decisions. Our focus is on developing predictive models and decision support systems that can provide resource managers and the public with an ability to understand and predict the consequences of decisions. These predictive models and support systems require an understanding of social and economic factors that are in turn affected by the decisions on land and resource use. Future efforts will focus on major societal issues and will emphasize integration of our scientific disciplines with social economic factors to understand and model key systems and to develop better tools for managers´ and the public´s use.

Mission Goal: Provide science for a changing world in response to present and anticipated needs to expand our understanding of environment and natural resource issues on regional, national, and global scales and enhance predictive/forecast modeling capabilities.

Long-Term Goal: Ensure the continued availability of long-term environmental and natural resource information and systematic analysis and investigations needed by customers, and, by 2005, develop 20 new decision support systems and predictive tools for informed decision making about natural systems.

Customer Satisfaction Measurement: USGS customers will be surveyed to determine their satisfaction with key USGS environment and natural resource information products. Product usefulness will be evaluated on the basis of customer requirements such as media, content, format, and timeliness. A baseline will be established in FY 2000, and targets will be set for the revised final FY 2001 plan to ensure continual improvement.

Relationship Between Long-Term Goal and Annual Performance Goal

The annual goal for environment and natural resources flows directly from the strategic goal, which supports the mission goal.

Strategy for Achieving the Goal

Programs: Environment and Natural Resource programs will focus on understanding, modeling, and predicting in an integrated manner how multiple forces affect natural systems. This knowledge will enable land managers, decision-makers, and citizens to make sound decisions about how to live on and manage the land. The USGS will provide these customers with an integrated understanding of natural systems at all scales, with more and better predictive tools and decision support systems, and with easier access to natural science data. USGS will continue to improve the quality and usefulness of its long term datasets and accompanying interpretive products, including water quantity and quality assessments, mineral and energy information, biological data and information, water use information, and high-quality digital maps depicting the character of the earth´s surface. In particular, the USGS will develop forecast and predictive models and decision support systems that allow managers and decision-makers to evaluate the resource and environmental consequences of management choices under various scenarios. This information can be used to inform management decisions.

Customers: The USGS will focus on key users of environment and natural resources information, such as Federal, State and local managers, to ensure that their needs are understood and are being met. USGS will increase development and delivery of products and services tailored to the current and future needs of these customers.

Operations: USGS will improve the efficiency of its administrative, science support, and programmatic activities to streamline systems for delivery of environment and natural resources data and information. USGS will implement its Information Infrastructure Plan to ensure that data comply with common standards and protocols.

People: As with the Hazards Strategic Goal, USGS employees are at the core of our long-term strategy for achieving the Environment and Natural Resources Goal. USGS will assess its current capabilities and skills and actively invest in training its employees in the skills needed to improve our ability to understand natural systems, develop improved forecast and predictive models, and better communicate with customers. USGS is aligning its rewards systems to reinforce the need for better integration of its capabilities and for more responsiveness to customer needs. Finally, USGS will take steps to increase its flexibility to respond quickly and effectively to the needs of our customers by putting in place new contractual vehicles for obtaining new skills, removing barriers to resource sharing, and increasing use of cooperative agreements and partnerships with other entities who use our data and information on natural resources and the environment.

A USGS scientist weighs a polar bear cub on the Beaufort Sea.

Key Factors Affecting Goal Achievement

There are several key factors external to the U.S. Geological Survey and beyond its control that could significantly affect the achievement of this goal:

• Cooperative Monitoring and Data Collection: Long-term data-collection, monitoring, and assessment programs are costly. The USGS will continue to maintain the data-collection activities that are part of its core mission but with increasing reliance on its partners for key sources of complementary data.
• Access: The USGS depends on the willingness of private landowners, regulatory and management agencies, and private industry for access and permission to collect and use cartographic, geographic, geologic, biologic, and hydrologic data.
• New Technologies: Advances in scientific understanding, monitoring systems, and analytical techniques have revolutionized the natural sciences and are likely to dramatically improve our ability to understand change and how it affects natural systems. For example, we can characterize land use and land cover through remote sensing; map the coastal ocean floor and coastlines using advanced laser techniques; detect and analyze chemical compounds at minute levels in the environment; use genetic and molecular tools for wildlife population and community monitoring and ecological risk assessments for wildlife; create geographic information system maps, predictive models, and visualizations of model results using advanced computer technology; conduct resource assessments using ground-penetrating radar; and monitor changes to the Earth's surface using satellite radar techniques. The USGS must continue to use new technologies to reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of our science in the environment and natural resources sciences.

Cross-cutting Relationships to Other Bureaus and Agencies

Partnerships, cooperation, and coordination are a critical component of USGS programs. In addition to our priority science agreements with DOI bureaus, the USGS actively seeks to partner with other Federal, State, and local agencies and the university community in addressing its Environment and Natural Resources mission and long-term goals. For example:

• USGS works with more than 1,200 state and local partners and about 30 Federal partners to develop a wide range of water resources information.
• USGS has approximately 40 cooperative research units at State universities that conduct graduate research on a wide range of biological issues.
• USGS scientists are working with multiple and diverse partners to understand, evaluate, and provide options for restoring fish and wildlife habitats and better guide resource management decisions in interagency ecosystem initiatives in South Florida, San Francisco Bay, Platte River, Mojave Desert, Chesapeake Bay, and Yellowstone.
• USGS provides government-wide leadership to ensure coordinated planning and execution of Federal geospatial mapping efforts through its chairmanship of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Subcommittee on Base Cartographic Data and its responsibility for the FGDC Secretariat.

These partnerships will become even more important as the USGS focuses on major societal issues and emphasizes the integration of its science activities with social and economic factors.