| This report is the first of a series of reports on the status and trends of the nation's plants, animals, and ecosystems. It represents an effort to bridge the gap between scientists and resource managers, policy makers, and the general public. Usually, scientists tend to write for scientific journals and communicate with other scientists; this report attempts to collect a great variety of scientific data and interpret it for the nonscientist while maintaining the full credibility of the data. |
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| The articles included represent both invited and contributed papers; that is, where we could identify specific subject experts, we invited them to submit papers, and we also accepted papers contributed by other authors. Following scientific tradition, each article submitted was peer-reviewed, usually by three anonymous scientific reviewers. The articles are often abridged from a complete scientific treatise, but each article contains references and personal contacts if the reader is interested in pursuing the subject in greater depth. Finally, we recognize that this report is incomplete and that more status and trends data exist than we were able to uncover or incorporate into one volume. |
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