The proposed final draft of the Delta Science Plan is now posted and available at the Delta Stewardship Council website.
Currently, science efforts in the Delta are performed by multiple agencies and organizations with the science community lacking the coordination, support, and tools that are needed to produce and communicate credible, relevant and legitimate science to policymakers and managers. The Delta Science Plan, in development since last year,seeks to address this problem by building an open science community that will work collaboratively to build a shared body of knowledge that is accepted and considered credible, as well as provide an effective interface between scientists and decision makers so that science can be incorporated into difficult policy and management decisions about the Delta.
The Delta Science Plan seeks to build on existing successful efforts already underway while developing new processes and mechanisms where needed. The Plan specifies 31 actions intended to achieve the objectives of enabling and promoting science synthesis, managing scientific conflict, prioritizing and coordinating Delta science efforts, building effective policy-science interactions, providing support for effective adaptive management, and maintaining and advancing understanding about the Delta. Simply put, “the Delta Science Plan addresses how to determine what science needs to be done in an open and transparent way, how it can be done most effectively and efficiently, and how it can best be made available to those who need to use it.”
The Delta Science Plan is the first element of a three-part planning, implementation, and reporting strategy that also includes developing a Science Action Agenda and producing an updated synthesis of the current scientific knowledge, The State of Bay-Delta Science.
I’ll post more on the Delta Science Plan once I’ve had a chance to delve into the document, as well as cover the presentation of the Plan at the upcoming Delta Stewardship Council meeting, so stay tuned to the Notebook blog for more!
Click here for the proposed final draft of the Delta Science Plan.
