Report on the Environment Trend Summary Protocol
The Report on the Environment (ROE) team within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) has enhanced the presentation of information on the ROE website by adding summaries of indicator trends, or changes in indicators over time. In 2020, ORD convened subject matter experts from EPA Program Offices for a series of workshops to brainstorm approaches. Following the workshops, an EPA ROE trends workgroup further developed the concept and plan for presenting a summary of indicator trends on the ROE website. A new, sortable summary table allows ROE users to see, at a glance, trend directions either for all indicators, or for user-selected subsets of indicators (e.g., within a given indicator theme area such as air or health). This trend summary table includes two elements: • Symbols representing trend direction for each indicator. • Key stories providing brief, high level descriptions of each indicator trend. The purpose of this document is to lay out the ROE protocol for defining the trend direction for each indicator and developing the associated key stories. This protocol serves as a roadmap for establishing the trend direction symbols and key stories for existing ROE indicators and any new (or newly updated) indicators as they are added to the ROE.