Review of ecological valuation and equivalency analysis methods for assessing temperate nearshore submerged aquatic vegetation.

Nearshore seagrass, kelp, and other macroalgae beds (submerged aquatic vegetation [SAV]) are productive and important ecosystems. Mitigating anthropogenic impacts on these habitats requires tools to quantify their ecological value and the debits and credits of impact and mitigation. To summarize and clarify the state of SAV habitat quantification and available tools, we searched peer-reviewed literature and other agency documents for methods that either assigned ecological value to or calculated equivalencies between impact and mitigation in SAV.

Why is data sharing in collaborative natural resource efforts so hard and what can we do to improve it?

Increasingly, research and management in natural resource science rely on very large datasets compiled from multiple sources. While it is generally good to have more data, utilizing large, complex datasets has introduced challenges in data sharing, especially for collaborating researchers in disparate locations ("distributed research teams"). We surveyed natural resource scientists about common data-sharing problems.