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 facilitate decision support for implementation of the Accords, recovery planning under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Biological Opinion (BiOp), tribal co-management needs regarding US v. Oregon and the Pacific Salmon Treaty (PST).    The project is focused on, building data sharing and data management capabilities among the tribes.

The primary goal of the ITMD Project is to ensure the availability and efficient and accurate sharing of data among CRITFC and the four CRITFC-member tribes both internally and among state and federal co-managers.  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 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 monitors in the collection, storage, summarization, and dissemination of data in a timely, accurate, and cost-effective fashion. The ITMD Project also serves a coordination function between member tribes and regional co-managers on data management issues and aids in the collection of monitoring datasets for tribal and regional analysts, e.g. Coordinated Assessments.

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

1. Identify cost effective data management strategies and architectures and fund the development of pilot projects based on an individual tribal staff and project need.  Pilot systems may include hardware and software tools as well as web applications that help collect, store, summarize, and disseminate fish and habitat data. Pilot projects deemed as “successful” are converted into production systems which are then updated and improved by ITMD staff as resources allow.
2. Provide data management services to the tribes, which includes: a) partial support for tribal data stewards at each of the tribes, b) developing and/or promoting shared data capture, management, and reporting tools for CRITFC and member tribes, c) and offer expertise and coordination of efforts.  
3. Enable tribal participation in regional data management coordination processes, such as the Coordinated Assessments Exchange Network system (CA-XCT or CAX) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Data Exchange Network (EN), which have regional data sharing nodes.  The ITMD staff attend several regional data management forums, meetings, and processes and report information to the tribes that are unable to attend.
For the tribes and CRITFC, the last 10 years 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 organized and stored in individual folders and Excel workbooks, Microsoft Access Databases, or equivalent data storage software.  At the completion of the eleventh year of this project, the ITMD Project is focusing on three main goals:

     a) Establish a pilot centralized data management system with the NPT, CTWSRO, and
         CRITFC, and assist YN with their pilot centralized data management system.
     b) Enable automated upload of relevant data and indicator into regional data
          repositories, e.g., CAX.
     c) Continue to update the current digital pen technology on which many of our
         production and future pilot data management systems are based.

The ITMD Project also helps CTUIR promote their centralized data management system (CDMS) created by the GIS Program and their software developers at CTUIR. Three of the four tribes and CRITFC are now ready to adopt this system, or something similar, for data management needs.  The CDMS is a web-based open source software application, developed over the last 10 years to store fisheries Research, Monitoring, and Evaluation (RM&E) and habitat data. The CDMS provides an enterprise solution for secure, centrally located data management to efficiently use data to inform decisions and policies related to tribal natural resource management.  The CDMS also develops capacity for data sharing agreements and allows the tribes the ability to define the quality and quantity of information shared to other state and federal agencies.  CTUIR have created many CDMS modules for datasets collected by tribal biologists, which can be shared and customized to promote standardization of each tribes’ project datasets. See the 2016 Annual Progress Report (posted to BPA under contract 73789) for  more details of expectations and planned work for the tenth year of funding.

Early in the Accord funding cycle, the ITMD Project invested in thirty Anoto digital pens for field data collection and a SharePoint-based pen data management system developed by Adapx, Inc. ITMD staff in partnership with NPT, YN, and CRITFC field crews and project managers successfully developed four data management systems on the Adapx platform. Adapx, Inc went out of business in 2015 shortly after Microsoft announced plans to discontinue support of its Silverlight web browser plug-in, a key component of the Adapx product. In 2016, ITMD invested in Anoto Live Forms: a second-generation digital pen system with a more stable PHP/HTML5 technical foundation. In 2017 and finishing in 2018, project staff converted all the systems developed on the obsolete Adapx platform to the new Anoto Live platform.  In 2018, the CTWSRO joined the digital pen data management system to collect and report data for their screw trap project  (wild Chinook and Coho salmon, steelhead, and Pacific Lamprey are trapped on several streams and rivers in the Warm Springs River Basin).