Global environmental characterization: Lessons from the NOAA-EPA Global Ecosystems Database Project

The goal of the global change effort, as written by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Committee on Earth System Science (1988), is:

To obtain a scientific understanding of the entire Earth system on a global scale by describing how its component parts and their interactions have evolved, how they function, and how they may be expected to continue to evolve on all time scales.