national scientific communities are important in shaping policy and thus ultimately environmental stressors.
The arguments about the importance of culture are less well developed but are certainly plausible. We don’t
have reasonable ways to test these hypotheses at present, but we can imagine modest investments that would
provide the data needed. Moving towards multi-level analysis. Along with direct investments in data needs identified by the
community, federal research funders could require that all archived data collected with federal support include
geo-codes. There are of course confidentiality issues but we are learning how to address those (Van Wey et al.
2005). For many data sets the addition of a simple geocode would be very low cost but over time would lead
to a substantial growth in our ability to link data sets. In particular, geo-coded survey data on individuals or
organizations would allow for multi-level analysis, and thus the effective linking of macro and micro level for
more robust theory.
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