Stresses such as land and water use changes, resource exploitation, invasive species, pollution and nutrient enrichment, and climate change, produce adverse effects on the Nation' s environmental resources. Science can help determine whether and how these stresses have impaired ecosystem structure and function and identify approaches to prevent further damage, preserve and improve productivity and resiliency, and enhance recovery. To improve the science base and help guide decisionmakers in these efforts, the budget includes substantial increases in a number of environmental research programs.

Integrated Science for Ecological Challenges (ISEC). The budget provides $96 million for the ISEC initiative, to be shared among USDA, USGS, NOAA, NSF, and EPA. ISEC will:

• improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of hypoxia and harmful algal blooms, which are impacting some of our most valuable water bodies;
• intensify activities to discover and understand the importance and ecological role of biodiversity;
• increase the study of ecosystem processes to improve our ability to predict responses to chronic or multiple stresses, detect loss of critical function, and assess ecosystem health and condition;
• make it possible to begin to apply 21^st century information technology to ecological data to vastly improve information content and availability of data to the scientific community.

• the origins, rates, and likely future course of natural and anthropogenic changes;
• the combined effects of multiple stresses on ecosystems;
• global environmental change and its processes on finer spatial scales and across a wide range of timescales; and
• the potential for unexpected and abrupt changes in the global environment;
• the consequences and impacts of global environmental change for the United States.

Improving Our Understanding of Carbon Sinks and Sources: The budget includes $189 million for a focused program of research to resolve critical issues on the carbon cycle. The research targets significant uncertainties on how much carbon is taken up by terrestrial sinks and how long such sinks will last, and ultimately will address 5 objectives:

• development of an observational infrastructure to accurately measure sources and sinks of CO₂ from the world' s major regions;
• prediction of lifetime, sustainability, and interannual/decadal variability of terrestrial sinks;
• provision of a scientific basis for evaluating management strategies to enhance carbon sequestration;
• development of a capability to monitor the effectiveness and stability of sequestration; and
• development of an ability for early detection of major carbon cycle shifts that could lead to rapid CO₂ release.

 

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