Presidential Report Calls for Improved Accounting of Ecosystem Services and Greater Protection of Environmental Capital

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) called on the US federal government to "launch a series of efforts to assess thoroughly the condition of U.S. ecosystems and the social and economic value of the services those ecosystems provide,...[and to] apply modern informatics technologies to the vast stores of biodiversity data already collected by various Federal agencies in order to increase the usefulness of those data for decision- and policy-making....The report...recommends that NSTC [National Science and Technology Council] establish an Ecoinformatics-based Open Resources and Machine Accessibility (EcoINFORMA) initiative. A primary goal of the initiative would be to ensure that Federal datasets relating to environmental health --as well as supporting socioeconomic and geophysical data relevant for ecosystem valuation and decision-making-- are published in machine-readable, interoperable formats to facilitate use by various stakeholders, including academic researchers, community organizations, and public policy officials...."