PNAMP Aquatic Monitoring Inventory project

Summary

The Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, StreamNet Project, in cooperation with the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership (PNAMP), proposes to 1) conduct an inventory of aquatic and related monitoring activities in the Pacific Northwest to compile a repository of information that provides an overview of who is doing what monitoring in which locations, 2) develop an on-line questionnaire to capture inventory information and to allow monitoring practitioners to enter their information independently, and 3) to develop an on-line map interface to access the inventory information.  This request for $47,639 will provide partial support for conducting the inventory described in item 1 and entry of information into the interface described in item 2.  Development of the on-line questionnaire and output interfaces, overall project supervision, and partial funding support will be contributed by the StreamNet Project as part of its existing contract obligation to provide data management support to Fish and Wildlife Program activities.  This proposal is being scaled to fit anticipated funding availability and to produce significant but preliminary results in a relatively short time frame.  It is anticipated that this initial effort will determine the scope of the effort, identify the availability of information and willingness to participate, and inform discussions about future completion and update of inventory information.


Project Description

The Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership (http://www.pnamp.org) is a collaborative effort among 18 agencies and organizations signatory to a formal charter.  Support for PNAMP activities comes from direct contributions from several signatories, including from BPA under the Fish and Wildlife Program, and in-kind contributions of time from participants.  A primary goal for fiscal year 2006 is an inventory effort to catalog aquatic and related monitoring activities in the Pacific Northwest, including northern California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and the Columbia Basin portion of Montana.  The goal is premised on the idea that knowing what monitoring is being conducted around the PNW will allow for increased coordination and efficiency of monitoring activities; avoidance of duplication of effort; and clear illustration of where monitoring may be adequate, deficient or excessive.  This, in turn, will help inform planning and decisions on developing and funding monitoring programs.  Users of this information will include those designing monitoring programs in a variety of agencies, field monitoring personnel, and programs that fund monitoring activities.

This proposal is to conduct an inventory of monitoring activities over a short (three month) time period to gather as much information as possible in that time.  The inventory will cover a wide scope of monitoring activities, including fish population monitoring, aquatic habitat monitoring, ecological monitoring (including water quality), and restoration project effectiveness monitoring from the estuary to the headwaters and the riparian zones.  Such monitoring is done by a variety of agencies and programs, including but not limited to state, tribal and federal environmental and fish and wildlife agencies, state, tribal and federal land management agencies, water resource agencies, research institutions and NGOs.  Given this breadth and the short time period, it will not be possible to include all monitoring activities.  Responses will also be inhibited to some degree because some monitoring practitioners will be in the field during the time of this survey.  A number of other surveys of data gathering have been undertaken recently by others, and some practitioners may be tired of being asked about what they are doing.  To deal with this potential impediment, we intend to mine the databases from as many previous survey programs as we can find to pre-populate this survey and avoid repeated contacts.

This project will utilize the organizational structure of the StreamNet Project (http://www.streamnet.org/), which includes project staff located in the four state fish and wildlife agencies of the PNW.  A Project Leader will be located at Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, which administers StreamNet, in Portland, OR, to guide the project and supervise three field technicians.  The field technicians will be located in Corvallis, OR, Olympia, WA, and Boise, ID.  The technicians will work closely with StreamNet staff in those locations.  Initial project duration will be three months.  The project staff members are being dispersed to locations with high density of natural resources agencies to maximize the efficiency of contacts.  Information on monitoring activities will be captured in three primary ways:  
1)  The technicians will locate as many existing databases of monitoring activities as possible, arrange for acquisition of data, and import the relevant information into the database for this project.  Monitoring practitioners for these efforts will be contacted only if key data are missing from the preceding databases.  Preexisting monitoring information exists in a Washington survey of monitoring programs by state agencies, the Collaborative Systemwide Monitoring and Evaluation Project, the State of the Salmon Project, and potentially other projects.
2)  The on-line questionnaire about monitoring activities will be publicized within agencies and programs that conduct monitoring to notify them of the project and request voluntary participation.  Practitioners will be asked to enter their monitoring information directly into the application.  Members of the PNAMP work group for this inventory project will work to make contacts within their agencies and promote participation.
3)  The project leader and technicians will contact as many field offices as possible to identify those involved in monitoring and make direct appeals for information.  Those contacted will be asked to fill out the on-line questionnaire or respond to verbal questions at their preference.  We expect that a large proportion of monitoring practitioners will be busy and lack time to use the on-line questionnaire, so we anticipate that the technicians will enter the information for most of the people they contact.

The inventory questionnaire is being designed to minimize impact on respondents.  The first question will ask whether the respondent has already given similar information to another survey, and if so, identify which one.  If an affirmative answer is given, the technician will stop the interview and work to obtain the appropriate information from the previous survey.  The respondent will be contacted again by this project only if key required information is unavailable in the previous survey.

For monitoring efforts not previously surveyed, the questionnaire will ask basic questions about the kind of monitoring currently planned or being done and the locations of that monitoring.  Location information will be taken in whatever format is most convenient for the respondent, and then converted to fifth field Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC5) as the basis for final location representation.  Respondents will also be asked for a contact person and information about the availability of resulting data.

Some PNAMP members have asked for information on the cost of individual monitoring efforts, but because few agencies budget or cost account by sampling location or separate out field sampling costs from other expenditures, cost estimates will be general, at best.

The questionnaire will conclude with a request for the respondent to identify other monitoring efforts that they are aware of as a means of locating as many monitoring efforts as possible.

The on-line questionnaire will capture survey data in a relational database.  Routines will be written to convert the various kinds of location information into HUC5 designations.  This process will be automated to the degree possible, but some calculation by hand will be necessary, depending on the kind of location information provided.

As soon as the questionnaire is operational it will be beta tested by the members of the PNAMP Inventory Work Group.  These monitoring practitioners will enter information from their own programs as a test of the system, and any necessary adjustments will be made.  Once data are flowing into the database, StreamNet will design an online interactive map interface that will serve to illustrate the locations of all surveyed monitoring efforts by HUC5.  Users will be able to zoom into an area in the Pacific Northwest and see all HUC5s that have monitoring programs identified.  Upon clicking on a HUC5, the application will then display a table of all identified monitoring activities for that HUC, including information on how to contact the monitoring project and obtain information from it.  Additional features will include the ability to query the survey database to identify monitoring efforts by agency, location, target species, or monitoring type.

Deliverables from this project will include the questionnaire, the on-line survey interface, the database of responses, the on-line map application, and a final report describing project results and recommendations for completing and updating the effort.