James S. Clark,^1* Steven R. Carpenter,² Mary Barber,³ Scott Collins,⁴ Andy Dobson,⁵ Jonathan A. Foley,⁶ David M. Lodge,⁷ Mercedes Pascual,⁸ Roger Pielke Jr.,⁹ William Pizer,¹⁰ Cathy Pringle,¹¹ Walter V. Reid,¹² Kenneth A. Rose,¹³ Osvaldo Sala,¹⁴ William H. Schlesinger,¹⁵ Diana H. Wall,¹⁶ David Wear¹⁷

Planning and decision-making can be improved by access to reliable forecasts of ecosystem state, ecosystem services, and natural capital. Availability of new data sets, together with progress in computation and statistics, will increase our ability to forecast ecosystem change. An agenda that would lead toward a capacity to produce, evaluate, and communicate forecasts of critical ecosystem services requires a process that engages scientists and decision-makers. Interdisciplinary linkages are necessary because of the climate and societal controls on ecosystems, the feedbacks involving social change, and the decision-making relevance of forecasts.

¹ Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708 USA.
² University of Wisconsin Center for Limnology, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
³ Ecological Society of America, 1707 H Street NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20006, USA.
⁴ Division of Biology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA.
⁵ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
⁶ Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
⁷ Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.
⁸ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
⁹ Environmental and Societal Impacts Group/National Center for Atmospheric Research, 3250 Mitchell Lane, Boulder, CO 80301, USA.
¹⁰ Resources for the Future, 1616 P Street NW, Washington, DC 20036, USA.
¹¹ Department of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
¹² Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 731 North 79th Street, Seattle, WA 98103, USA.
¹³ Coastal Fisheries Institute and Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA.
¹⁴ Department of Ecology, Faculty of Agronomy-IFEVA, University of Buenos Aires-CONICET, Buenos Aires 1417, Argentina.
¹⁵ Nicholas School of Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
¹⁶ Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA.
¹⁷ United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Post Office Box 12254, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA.
^*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jimclark{at}duke.edu