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Biodiversity research in the United States should be boosted because it will lead to a healthier environment which will, in turn, strengthen the nation's economy, an influential panel of scientists says.

In a report requested last year by President Bill Clinton — and to be delivered next month — the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) says that spending on biodiversity research should grow from $460 million a year to $660 million over the next three years. The report was prepared for PCAST by a panel chaired by Peter Raven, the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis.

“I think that the logic of [the report] is compelling,” says Murray Gell-Mann of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, a member of PCAST and of Raven's panel. He adds that the report's suggested “synergy” between the environment and the economy “will resonate with people, including members of Congress”.

In the recent past, the discipline has been attacked by conservatives in Congress, who see the gathering of information on biodiversity as a threat to landowners' property rights.

As a result of such attacks, for example, the National Biological Survey was disbanded by the Congress in 1995, and the Senate has declined to ratify the international Convention on Biological Diversity, the agreement signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which has already been ratified by 161 other countries.

The report emphasizes the relationships between biodiversity conservation, a healthy environment and a strong economy. It also calls for the development of better computer networkand databases for information about plant and animal species.

Five major funding proposals are suggested by the panel for consideration by the dozen or so federal agencies involved in biodiversity research, over the next three years. They are:

• an increase from $74 million to $130 million a year in funding for taxonomists to discover and describe new species;

• an increase from $300 million to $355 million for research and monitoring of ecosystems;

• $24 million in new money for social science research, chiefly at the National Science Foundation, to improve estimates of the economic value of sound environmental management;

• “a minimum of $40 million a year” to develop a ‘next generation’ National Biological Information Infrastructure on which information about species can be stored and accessed;

• spending on environmental education to rise from $72 million to $87 million, mostly to train 10,000 schoolteachers a year about environmental science.

The recommendations are largely based on discussions with government scientists about their resource needs, and these scientists are pleased about the outcome. “For us, this is a breath of fresh air,” says Michael Ruggiero, a senior ecologist at the Biological Resources Division of the United States Geological Survey , which has absorbed the National Biological Survey.

Consideration by PCAST, Ruggiero says, “may be the highest level at which this issue has ever been addressed”.

If previous PCAST studies are any guide, the Raven panel is likely to have significant influence on next year's budget requests from the agencies involved. But changing Congress's approach will be a larger challenge.

“There's a lack of general appreciation of what scientists are coming to understand about connections between the loss of biodiversity and the things that people care about,” concedes Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University, a panel member. The report, she adds, is “just one stage” in changing that appreciation.