The key factor that separates this issue from other environmental issues, and augurs well for real progress, is that commerce, agriculture, forestry, and conservation and environmental stakeholders are all on the same side. It is not a situation in which an industry wants to increase production and environmentalists want to stop them. Usually in the NIS struggle, all sides lose together, they all want pretty much the same thing, and they are beginning to understand that cooperation and coordination can help everybody. One key focus of the Executive Order will be to improve cooperation among agencies, but this is already happening. Everyone recognizes that data are crucial to understanding the problem and that we cannot begin to solve it until we understand it.
Needs are both short term and long term.
Because the whole reason for the interest in invasive NIS is the problems they cause now, short-term needs must take precedence. We have to be able to provide the data that are needed, right now, to help managers in the field. A general urgent short-term need is to have sufficiently comprehensive and accessible data that it is possible to tell quickly whether a report represents a totally new threat, a range extension of a threat that already exists, or simply just another record of something already known. State and Local Needs. Many people who have to deal on the ground with NIS, in both decision-making and managerial capacities, are not in federal agencies or international programs.