Living standards created in any geographic region from manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation and tourism are inextricably linked through the economy to the integrity of the natural resources from which they are derived. As single-issue economic and environmental policies evolve to reflect the complex trade-offs needed for sustainable living standards, the scientific community must clarify the important relationships between the quality of the environment and the quality of life in our cities and rural areas. Integrated policies for large human dominated ecosystems will require new scientific foundations built on the integration of environmental and socioeconomic data and models which are currently unavailable to policy-makers.

Quantifying the relationships between the condition of the environment and that of regional economic sectors is the only way to guide the seemingly incongruous demands which arise from multiple uses of our resources. The EPA Ecological Research Program seeks to fill this gap by focusing research on the determinants of biological integrity for designated uses and on their relationships with socioeconomic activity. Invasive species, habitat alteration, land erosion, and over enrichment of nutrients are cross-cutting determinants for our ecosystem objectives as well as benchmarks for improving and sustaining socioeconomic conditions.

It took more than five years for the EPA Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) to develop methods for measuring the integrity of biological communities and another five years to demonstrate scientific "proof of concept" for measuring regional environmental quality. Those proof of concept studies were successfully conducted in the Mid-Atlantic region which now makes this region a logical place for a scientific examination of the linkages between environmental quality, the regional economy, and the policies that govern them. We are approaching this challenge by examining "sustainability thresholds" based on fundamental ecological processes and the incremental contribution of human activity profiles toward a cumulative impact on the quality of the environment. This presentation will review the progress of developing objective measures to inform decision-makers on the quality of the environment as well as our approach to improve our understanding of the environmental consequences of public policy.