What science can and cannot provide policy makers in managing agricultural landscapes for environmental quality

Excerpt

In their chapter, “Ecosystem Services in Agricultural Landscapes,” in Managing Agricultural Landscapes for Environmental Quality, Groffman et al. (2007) summarize the state of our knowledge about how to account for environmental effects and the steps that must be taken to allow us to do that better. What will be critical is the ability to measure ecosystem services and convey at least their relative value. In addition, such goods and services must be those that the public values and identifies with if they are to enter the decision process for setting objectives and allocating resources. Hopefully, the ability to do this can be the basis for answering the critically important “so what” questions that are posed about a public program or activity.

Measurement is critical to the “so what” question in that it has to be accurate enough for the task at hand—in some cases only relative magnitudes may be required. It may or may not matter whether the answer is through monitoring or modeling. What will be critical is that the public and policymakers understand where the science is at in its ability to inform through measurement and assessment and also to understand the degree of validity that can be…