BREAKOUT SESSION 24

1
BREAKOUT SESSION 24

• Designing for Complementarity Among
  ProgramsGenerating Environmental and Health
  Information
• Pre-Session Discussion Notes

2
Looking Back

• Reference is made to
• Finding the Forest in the Trees
• The Challenge of Combining Diverse Environmental
  Data
• National Research Council. 1995.
• Committee for a Pilot Study on Database
  Interfaces

3
Its Issues

• . . . the observational, computational, and
  communications technologies have enabled the
  scientific community to undertake a broad range
  of interdisciplinary environmental research and
  assessment programs.
• Sound practice in database management is
  required to deal with the problems of complexity
  in such programs and a great deal of attention
  and resources has been devoted to this area in
  recent years.
• . . . little guidance has been provided on
  overcoming the barriers frequently encountered in
  the interfacing of disparate data sets.

4
Its Recommendations

• 1. In the planning for interdisciplinary
  research, careful thought should be given to the
  implications of different inherent spatial and
  temporal scales and the processes they represent.
• 2. Metadata should explicitly describe all
  preliminary processing associated with each data
  set, along with its underlying scientific purpose
  and its effects on the suitability of the data
  for various purposes.
• 3. All proposed data management and interfacing
  methods should be weighed carefully in terms of
  their ability to deal with large volumes of data.
• 4. Efforts to establish data standards should
  focus on a key subset of common parameters whose
  standardization would most facilitate data
  interfacing.
• 5. Agencies that perform or support environmental
  research and assessment generally, and global
  change research particularly, should identify and
  define key ecological data sets that do not exist
  but are important to their mission.

5
Its Recommendations

• 6. Project scientists and data managers should
  adopt the view that one of their primary
  responsibilities is the creation of long-lasting
  data and information resources for the broad
  research community.
• 7. Professional societies, research institutions,
  and funding and management agencies should
  reevaluate their reward systems in order to give
  deserved peer recognition to scientists and data
  managers for their contributions to
  interdisciplinary research.
• 8. Because organizational missions and reward
  systems inherently reflect a larger policy
  context, relevant policy issues should be
  included in the planning for interdisciplinary
  research.
• 9. Research universities should include courses
  in their curricula that provide environmental
  scientists with an in-depth understanding of the
  rationale for and principles of sound data
  management.
• 10. In order to encourage interdisciplinary
  research and to make data available as quickly as
  possible to all researchers, specific guidelines
  should be established for when and under what
  conditions data will be made available to users
  other than those who collected them.

6
Its Recommendations

• 11. In the planning of any interdisciplinary
  research program, as much consideration should be
  given to organizational and institutional issues
  as to technical issues.
• 12. The agencies involved in supporting and
  carrying out interdisciplinary research should
  investigate the possibility of establishing one
  or more ecosystem data and information analysis
  centers to facilitate the exchange of data and
  access to data, help improve and maintain the
  quality of valuable data sets, and provide
  value-added services.
• 13. Hardware/software system development efforts
  should be based on a model that includes ongoing
  interaction with users as an integral part of the
  design process. In addition, system designers
  should work from the assumption that systems will
  never be finished, but will continue to evolve
  along with the data collected and users' needs.

7
Its Recommendations

• 14. Program managers, project scientists, and
  data managers should review the interoperability
  of their hardware, software, and data management
  technologies to facilitate locating, retrieving,
  and working with data across several disciplines.
• 15. The production of detailed metadata should be
  a mandatory requirement of every study whose data
  might be used for interdisciplinary research.
• 16. Metadata should contain enough information to
  enable users who are not intimately familiar with
  the data to backtrack to earlier versions of the
  data so that they can perform their own
  processing or derivation as needed.
• 17. In general, the presumption in environmental
  research should be that "data worth collecting
  are worth saving."
• 18. The committee is concerned about the gaps in
  the existing system for long-term retention and
  maintenance of environmental data. Funding
  agencies should provide guidelines that define
  the requirements for preparing data sets for
  long-term archiving.

8
Its Keys To Success

• Be practical.
• Use appropriate information technology.
• Start at the right scale.
• Proceed incrementally.
• Plan for and build on success.
• Use a collaborative approach.
• Account for human behavior and motivation.
• Consider needs of participants as well as users.
• Create common needs for data.
• Build participation by demonstrating the value of
  data interfacing.

9
Looking Back

• Reference is made to
• Environmental Health Indicators Bridging the
  Chasm of Public Health and the Environment A
  Workshop
• Institute of Medicine. 2004.
• Roundtable on Environmental Health
• Sciences, Research, and Medicine.

10
Workshop Foci

• envision a national tracking system to bridge the
  gap between health and the environment
• identifying, developing, and using indicators to
  monitor environmental health
• dialogue on benefits and limitations of a
  national environmental health monitoring system
  and discuss steps needed to create this system.

11
Stated Challenges Ahead

• Environmental Health Monitoring System Overview
• Limitation of the Environmental Monitoring
  System and
• Learning Lessons from Past and Current
  Monitoring Systems.
• Expanding Research Efforts
• Gaps in Data Collection
• Ensuring a Continuum of Data from Source to
  Health Outcome and
• Integrating Biomonitoring and Human Outcomes
  Data Across Agencies and Organizations.

12
Stated Challenges Ahead

• Improving Capacity
• Myriad Agencies Involved in Environmental Health
  MonitoringEliminating the Stovepipes and
• Personnel Infrastructure.
• Community Involvement
• Future Steps for Environmental Health Monitoring

13
Breakout Session 24 Challenges

• Incorporate human health, environmental health
  and ecosystem/wildlife health considerations
• Espouse Measure Once Use Many
• Capitalize on advancing information technologies
• Employ inclusive assessment approaches
• Advance communication for achievement of desired
  outcomes

14
Session Notes