Our living resources: A report to the nation on the distribution, abundance, and health of U.S. plants, animals, and ecosystems

This report on the distribution, abundance, and health of our nation's biological resources is the first product of the National Biological Service’s Status and Trends Program. This information has many potential uses: it can document successful management efforts so resource managers will know what has worked well; it can identify problems so managers can take early action to restore the resource in the most cost-efficient manner; and it can be used to highlight areas where additional research is needed, such as to determine why certain ecological changes are occurring. This report will also be useful to teachers, students, journalists, and citizens in general who are interested in national resource issues.

Another purpose of this report is to help identify gaps in existing resource inventory and monitoring programs. It contains information collected by a variety of existing research and monitoring efforts by scientists in the National Biological Service, other federal and state agencies, academia, and the private sector. The programs that produced the information in this document were not developed in a coordinated fashion to produce an integrated, comprehensive picture of the status and trends of our nation’s resources; rather, each was developed for its own particular purpose, usually to help manage a specific resource. Thus, even though articles vary greatly in scope, design, and purpose, this report has identified and attempted to combine many of the existing information sources into a broad picture of the condition of our resources. In the future, these sources will be complemented by additional information from other sources - such as state agencies and other inventory and monitoring studies - to fill in the gaps of knowledge and to provide a more complete understanding of the status of our living resources.

Study Area

Additional publication details
Publication type	Book
Publication Subtype	Monograph
Title	Our living resources: A report to the nation on the distribution, abundance, and health of U.S. plants, animals, and ecosystems
DOI	10.5962/bhl.title.4172
Year Published	1995
Language	English
Publisher	U.S. Department of the Interior, National Biological Service
Publisher location	Washington, D.C.
Contributing office(s)	Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center
Description	xi, 530 p.
Country	United States
Online Only (Y/N)	N
Additional Online Files (Y/N)	N
Google Analytic Metrics	Metrics page