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Research Institute Reborn

From an interview with Margaret Johnston, Executive Director, S.F. Estuary Institute

"This September we closed the Aquatic Habitat Institute (AHI) and created the San Francisco Estuary Institute. Our new mission is to provide the scientific understanding necessary to manage the Estuary. Currently, monitoring and research are done in a fragmented manner, and there is no mechanism to guarantee that scientific study addresses priority management issues in a comprehensive, coordinated, cost-effective way. The Estuary Institute addresses both these needs. And the approval of the CCMP and the evolving state-federal Bay-Delta Ecosystem Partnership show that a new level of cooperation among research interests and agencies may be possible.

"The Institute faces multiple challenges. First we must make sure that resource protection and restoration goals are specific enough to be measured; we must also design our monitoring program so that we can actually evaluate the success of management actions. Another big challenge will be to promote the kind of sustained, long-term ecosystem research program necessary to really understand how the Estuary functions.

"Of course, the understanding we gain of the Estuary will not be very useful to society if it is limited to a few scientists and decision-makers. We'll not only be working to make sure the data we and other agencies collect is available to everyone who wants it, but also to educate the public about the Estuary, and the relationship of their neighborhoods and their personal activities to its health. We also want to involve the public in watershed and wetlands monitoring. Much of the needed data could be collected by volunteers. In addition, we hope to develop some simple but meaningful measure of the "health of the Estuary" that reveals our progress towards environmental improvement goals.

"Two new committees will help us meet these challenges. Our committee of science advisors will provide scientific review of monitoring and research done by the Institute and other organizations and ensure these efforts fit together and address the big picture. A second advisory committee of user group, public interest and management agency representatives will help us strike the necessary balance between science and policy.

"Ultimately, what the public will get from the Institute is some assurance that good science is providing the basis for Estuary management. We will be collecting good information, providing thorough analysis and promoting free debate so that the closest possible thing to truth is what emerges."

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