The Inter-Tribal Monitoring Data (ITMD) Project is a Columbia Basin Fish Accords (Accords) project to support data management at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) and its member tribes, which include the Nez Perce Tribe (NPT), Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation (YN), Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon (CTWSRO), and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR). The purpose of the ITMD Project is to support decision frameworks for implementation of the Accords, recovery planning under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Biological Opinion (BiOp), and tribal co-management needs regarding US v. Oregon and the Pacific Salmon Treaty (PST). The project helps support building data management and data sharing capabilities among the four treaty tribes.

The primary goal of the ITMD Project is to support the four member tribes in implementation of their fish and habitat data management strategies by funding portions of data stewards' time to coordinate and implement data management best practices. The ITMD Project efforts are intended to help meet tribal resource co-management responsibilities and reporting needs of the Accords and BiOps, while also building capacity within the tribes to support informed resource policy management decisions. This has, and continues to be, accomplished through building databases and tools to assist tribal researchers and monitoring programs in the collection, storage, summarization, and dissemination of data. The ITMD Project also serves a coordination function between member tribes and regional co-managers on data management issues and aids in the dissemination of monitoring datasets, e.g. Coordinated Assessments.

The long-term strategy of the ITMD Project to address data management and sharing issues at the member tribes and CRITFC is based on three goals:  

1. Inter-tribal Coordination: Identify and promote opportunities for inter-tribal collaboration in implementing tribal data management strategies, policies, standards, practices, software and technology and assist tribal partners to build capacity to share data (or metrics) with regional partners.

2. Data Management Services:  Support data management services at the tribes and within CRITFC for tribal projects, which includes: a) partial funding for tribal data stewards, b) partial funding for developing and supporting central data management systems for member tribes and CRITFC, and c) partial funding for professional development of data management tribal and CRITFC staff.  

3. Regional Coordination:  Support tribal participation in regional data management coordination processes, such as the Coordinated Assessments Partnership (CAP) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Data Exchange Network (EN), which have regional data sharing nodes. In addition, the ITMD staff attend several regional data management forums, meetings, and processes and report information to the tribes that are unable to attend or have designated CRITFC staff as their representative[s] (e.g., StreamNet Executive Committee).

For the tribes and CRITFC, the last decade or more of assistance from the ITMD Project has improved tribal data infrastructure and the capacity to organize, analyze, and share data. Prior to the Accords, most of the systems at each tribe and CRITFC were not organized or located in a centralized data management system. At the completion of the twelfth year of this project, we are refocusing the ITMD Project and placing our efforts in the following three areas:

1) Support & Development: the ITMD Project will focus on helpdesk technical support for individual systems and other software tools used by tribal projects throughout the data life cycle. A primary focus will be Centralized Data Management System (CDMS) development to increase functionality of the process for data flow and system administration.

2) Consistency: A focus of the ITMD Project will be to provide direct support to tribes that do not have fully mature CDMS in place or have chosen to develop their own central data systems (e.g., YN).  The ITMD Project will provide direct support (through funding and ITMD staff time) or provide business requirements that are common across software architectures to support data management development at all the CRITFC member tribes.

3) Best Practices: The ITMD project will continue to support and develop best management practices at CRITFC and member tribes through collaboration, coordination, and self-evaluation.  In addition, the tribes will continue to move old systems and other legacy data sets into central data management systems and consider alternative/new technologies for data collection and flow.