Structured Science Syntheses: Getting Science Into Decisions on America’s Public Lands

Federal agencies — the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), National Park Service and Forest Service — manage more than 600 million acres of public land, 28 percent of all land in the United States. Much of it is managed for many uses at once: recreation, energy development, grazing, forestry, conservation and cultural preservation.

The problem: too much science, too little time

Decisions on these lands are bound by laws that require scientific information and analysis of environmental effects. The foundation is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires agencies to analyze the potential effects of actions that may significantly affect the environment, drawing on both natural and social science. Agencies may complete hundreds of these NEPA analyses a year, and usually fold analyses required by other laws into the same process.

Agencies are committed to science-informed decisions, but managers face real hurdles:

• the number of published scientific articles keeps growing
• staff may not have easy access to, or know about, all the research on a topic
• they rarely have time to find and analyze everything relevant
• they meet new and varied issues all the time, often without the background to synthesize the science quickly

A new kind of report

The U.S. Geological Survey has been working with other agencies to strengthen the use of science in public lands decisions — through a toolkit for scientists and managers to coproduce science, a framework for identifying the science managers most need, and annotated bibliographies on priority topics such as sage-grouse, invasive grasses and oil and gas reclamation.

Building on that work, USGS, BLM and FWS developed the structured science synthesis: a peer-reviewed, published report, coproduced with resource managers, that pulls together the science on one priority management issue.

The core sections of one synthesis, on how noise from oil and gas development may affect ungulates and small mammals. Photographs by David Korzilius and Mark Thonhoff (BLM) and Lance McNew and Tait Rutherford (USGS). Image from the USGS fact sheet.

What makes them different

• Built for decisions. Content is structured to match the steps of a NEPA analysis — identifying issues, describing the affected environment, predicting consequences, refining the proposed action.
• Focused on one issue. Typically the meeting of a proposed action (oil and gas development, grazing, recreation) and a resource it may affect (rare plants, wildlife, fish) — sometimes as narrow as how the noise or light from oil and gas development affects a species. Syntheses are chosen when effects are unclear, proposals are new or numerous, an agency lacks expertise, or the science is growing fast.
• Coproduced with the managers and specialists who will use them.
• Four kinds of science information, the ones NEPA analyses need: data on actions and resources, studies of effects, methods for quantifying effects, and mitigation measures. They complement local knowledge of the project and landscape, and point readers to further literature.

The four types of science information needed for NEPA analyses on multiple-use public lands. Image from the USGS fact sheet.

• Easy to use. Each opens with a concise executive summary explaining how to apply it, and uses clear headings, highlight boxes, tables, figures and graphical abstracts.
• Repeatable. Each rests on a published literature review whose methods section lists the search engines and search terms, so it can be updated.
• Layered. Summary findings in the main text, with detailed tables of individual studies and supplements such as a glossary and a step-by-step example analysis of a hypothetical proposed action.

How managers use them

For site-specific decisions, such as permitting a well or building a trail, and broader ones, such as BLM field office resource management plans, staff can:

• quote sentences or sections directly in NEPA documents
• cite sections, or attach them as appendices
• include the whole synthesis as supplemental information, or incorporate it by reference
• use it to find the most relevant primary research
• use it to spot gaps in the science for their decision

Sources

Based on "Structured science syntheses to inform decision making on Federal public lands," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2024–3028, with the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Figures from the same fact sheet.