Acadia Partners Blog

Denny and I got to thinking about the market support for science in the Park today. It is clear to us that there is important scientific work that is not getting done. This is not just because funds are short–which they are– but also because of the way that the work is valued. It seems to us that the valuation does not reflect the full “market” of information needs and of sources of financial support. It is the kind of problem that Acadia Partners was created to solve.

One of the most consistent, striking messages to come from the research opportunity catalog work over the past couple weeks (see the related story) is that the Park doesn’t really know who and what is living there. The Acadia resource management staff has a good list of the vertebrate animals in the Park, but when it comes to all the beetles, flies, spiders, worms, and other invertebrates, the staff has only a sketchy picture of the species living in the Park. And what is true for animals is even more true for plants. The staff has a good list of the vascular plants in the Park, but when it comes to the sphagnum mosses, lichens, fungi, and other non-vascular plants that make up so much of the Park’s ecosystem, there really is no good, complete picture of what is in the Park.

As David Manski noted, it is pretty hard to conserve resources that you don’t know to exist.

Beyond management–just speaking as someone who loves the Park–it actually comes as a surprise that we don’t have a complete picture of this place. Given the enormous development pressure on wild places along the coast, it seems so clear that, in these few protected areas that still remain, we should know what they contain.

Part of the reason that we don’t know more than we do has to do with some distinctions between some important words and also, of course, with money. This business of carefully identifying what lives in a place like Acadia is known as “inventory” work. Now, when I see people catching things, and looking at them under microscopes, and making notes about them, I figure that these people are scientists doing what I would call “research.” But to a real scientist, this inventory work is in a class apart from research. And one of the things that the scientist knows is that you can find money for “research” a heck of a lot more easily than you can find money for an “inventory.”

It is some kind of law of the marketplace for science as it stands today. Research — particularly research looking at things like genetics, is something for which you can find financial support. Inventories are not.

To its credit, the National Park Service recognizes that this situation is out of kilter. The Park Service knows that it is often the knowledge about what lives where that suggests new research questions. A complete, accurate picture of the ecosystem is really a foundation for hypotheses and research. Its like being sure that you have all the pieces of the puzzle before you put too much time into figuring out why any particular piece doesn’t quite fit. Consequently, the Park Service is making efforts to find internal support for some basic inventories. But Park Service funds don’t go very far–less and less each year, in fact. There is no way that the NPS can create a solid understanding of who and what lives in Acadia. On the other hand, the investment that the Park service is making is something that can be leveraged.

Acadia Partners sees this “market” for scientific work as broken and incomplete. It simply does not yet encompass the whole picture. We know, from experience, that there are people–private citizens who care about Acadia National Park–who do value having a complete picture of who and what lives in the Park. These people understand that having that knowledge is necessary to know what we have to conserve and, more important, who recognize the information to be valuable in itself.

We also know that the people in charge of managing the Park’s resources are hungry for these kinds of data. And now, after the research opportunities catalog work, we also know that there are scientists who also know that this work is valuable, and who want to do the work, if only they can get some support for it.

You can think of Acadia Partners as the “middle-man” in this market. Our job is to bring the different players together.

If we can figure out how to bring together these donors with these needs and with the scientists who are ready to go to work, we will develop new ways to bring private support to bear on a currently neglected area of scientific work. And, if we learn how to do this, Acadia Partners will not only have solved an important problem for Acadia, but will also have developed a model of support that can be used in other Parks.

We think that it is work that can make a real difference regarding what we know about our National Parks and how we protect them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Acadia National Park, Acadia Partners, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.