I think I would just like to highlight that the federal government is really in the best possible position to do these types of landscape-scale studies over a long timeframe. In the academic world you're dealing with grad students who may do two to four years of research and then they move on to the next project.
But the federal government really has the capacity to do these longer-term studies that look at changes over time. I think the examples I mentioned were turtles and birds. So for turtles, there's one endangered species called the wood turtle that doesn't reach sexual maturity until it's 20 years old. They can live to be up to 50-some years old. So if you're making changes to their habitat, it may take several generations of those turtles before you can find out whether or not it was actually effective. That's the type of long-term data that is almost unheard of in the scientific community.